February 2007 Archives

Blue Flavor is an established team of expert web developers, with access to every web technology that’s available. But when thePlatform came calling looking for a standards-based redesign that would produce search-engine friendly pages that could be easily updated, Blue Flavor chose Movable Type. We’re always thrilled when members of our Six Apart Professional Network have case studies to share with the community, so we were happy that Nick Finck, Blue Flavor’s Director of User Experience, had a few minutes to talk to us about the project.

Six Apart: So, to get started — who’s Blue Flavor:? I feel like I know you all since many of you have been in the blogging community forever, but maybe everybody doesn’t know the name yet.

Blue Flavor: Blue Flavor is seven people, myself, Brian Fling, D. Keith Robinson, Garrett Murray, Tom Watson, Kevin Tamura and Cyndi Fling. Brian, Keith and I make up the principals. Garrett is both the youngest age wise and employee wise… Sorry, he’s taken, ladies!

Six Apart: Hah! Great. So, the latest project I’ve seen your team launch is thePlatform. Before we get to the site itself — how do you end up in touch with a relatively large company, when you’re such a small (but admittedly well-established!) team?

Blue Flavor: They say it’s all about who you know. In this case, Keith has a pretty good relationship with the client. They knew we did web standards-based design and needed someone to come in and redesign their site the right way.

Six Apart: And the site they asked you to help with is thePlatform. What is it?

Blue Flavor: thePlatform is basically a broadband application service provider. They provide services that businesses use to manage and publish various kinds of broadband media. It’s one of those companies where you see their handiwork all the time as a consumer, but are not directly exposed to the technology. It’s all a seamless experience for you. The focus is mostly on business-to-business communication.

Six Apart: That sounds like a demanding audience — but if they all have broadband and presumably have the latest browsers and things, does it still matter that you’re building with web standards?

Blue Flavor: Of course, standards are always something we need to pay attention to. We always design and build our websites so that they are accessible to all, be it people with older browsers or people with screen readers. We like to layer the advanced technologies so that users who have systems or browsers that do not support those technologies can still access and read the content on the site. Just because the bandwidth may be there for your site’s audience doesn’t mean you should abuse it as a designer or developer.

Six Apart: That makes sense — you have to have technology that works for everyone. Switching gears a little bit, this doesn’t look like a blog, in the traditional sense. But it’s powered by Movable Type. How did you make that choice?

We’re happy to congratulate the smart folks over at Ning on the launch of their new version of their cool Social Network platform. But in addition to their hard work on their service, they’ve been doing some really creative writing on their Movable Type-powered company blog that’s worth a closer look.

As you’d expect from a tech startup, there’s a video walkthrough of the new site (it’s easy enough to embed videos from sites like PodTech in your blog), and some brief updates when the usual little launch-day glitches pop up.

But where Ning really went beyond the normal “We have a new product!” platitudes was in the other posts surrounding the launch. Take CEO Gina Bianchini’s “Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned by Starting a Web Company” — it’s the kind of personal story that really lets a community know about the human side of a company. We might be biased because a lot of her points are ones that resonate with us at Six Apart as an independent web startup ourselves. For example:

Sometimes it’s really easy to follow the crowd and use the “well, this service did it…” school of product design, even when it goes against what you stand for. We stand for the creation of social networks by everyone. Not just developers, start-ups, or big media companies, but everyone. For us, we see the goal as the freedom to make your social network whatever and whomever you decide it should be.

It’s an important point, well-articulated. And it’s the kind of message we’ve been trying to focus more on ourselves: We want blogging to be for everyone, not just for developers or web experts. So thanks to the entire Ning team, not just for making cool things, but for blogging a story that makes your work even more meaningful.

We’ve talked a bit about how remarkable the Movable Type community is, but it’s not just the work that our community does with blogs that makes them special. Take Kevin Shay — he’s a long time expert-level plugin developer, responsible for such cool stuff as BigPAPI, the innovative plugin framework which brought Greasemonkey-style UI plugins to Movable Type, which were later incorporated into the platform itself as Transformer plugins.

But Perl isn’t Kevin’s strongest language: English is. We’re happy to bring you a conversation between Jesse Thorn, host of The Sound of Young America, and the other Kevin Shay, Professional Network star, Movable Type user, and author of the recently released The End as I Know It. Kevin’s book, set in 1999, is a brilliantly observed, hysterical, and ultimately moving look at a man who’s both terrified of, and invigorated by, the pre-millennial hysteria about the Y2K bug.

Take a couple minutes and find out why, as happy as we are about the plugins Kevin’s created, we’re just as proud to have such a talented author as part of our community.

Use the player above or download the conversation and listen at your convenience.

It’s almost a habit — when we talk about people who use Movable Type, we say “the Movable Type community.” And people who don’t spend a lot of time surfing the web exploring blogs might scoff: “If everybody who uses software makes up a community, how come I never hear about the Norton Anti-Virus community?”

So it’s worth sharing just one of the many stories that makes the Movable Type community something special. Meet Arvind Satyanarayan. He’s the publisher of Movalog, the blog for all things Movable Type, and the creator of a number of the most popular Movable Type plugins in the world, including Privacy, his newest effort, and stalwarts such as Blogroll, LivePreview, EnhancedEntryEditing. Arvind’s also been a key driver behind efforts like the The Style Contest and tools like The Style Generator.

And Arvind is 17 years old, living in the United Arab Emirates.

Now here’s the thing — every tech community has its token Young Person. You can point to a standout whiz kid who does something cool with software and everybody says “aww, that’s so cute!” But this is where the Movable Type community takes that tech cliché and turns it into something really special.

Because, with the help of the rest of the community, Arvind’s been able to raise his skills to the next level. To tell the truth, when Arvind started IMing me a few years ago, I guessed he was just another kid who was maybe a Ben Trott fanboy and basically thought “That’s nice, but we’re pretty busy.” But through the diligent support of people on our team like our senior software engineer lead MT gearhead Brad Choate, Arvind’s picked up some pretty strong technical chops.

More to the point, the community outside Six Apart has been instrumental as well. Elise Bauer, the recipe maven responsible for Simply Recipes created the seminal Learning Movable Type site years ago, but many of the most popular and valuable tutorials on the site were created as a collaboration with Arvind.

All around the world

So what you see is Elise, a veteran of Silicon Valley who lives in California and maintains a massively popular blog, collaborating with a kid in the U.A.E. to educate an entire globe of bloggers about what’s possible.

It doesn’t end there. When Arvind needed an endorsement for his college applications, our Product Manager Byrne Reese led the charge. The Style Contest was an effort by many in the community, but a lot of the key collaboration happened between Arvind, Elise, and noted ProNet community member Jesse Gardner, who’s based in Pennsylvania. People all over the world have partnered with Arvind to make Movable Type do things we’d never even imagined.

And that support has helped Arvind take it to the next level. Customers for his plugins include some of the biggest companies in the world — think of some of the largest tech companies who are blogging, and you’ll probably see Arvind’s work behind the scenes. We’re also thrilled to announce that Arvind is the newest intern at Six Apart, helping with (what else!) improving our community efforts around the Movable Type plugin directory and our Professional Network.

That’s just part of the story, and of course we haven’t even gotten into dozens of examples of other work Arvind’s done, or other community members who’ve been similarly impressive and inspiring to us. But we thought one story of one Movable Type blogger going from “that kid in Dubai who IMs us in the middle of the night” to a valued member of the team shows what our community is all about.

Rebecca Blood hasn’t just been blogging longer than you, she literally wrote the book on blogging. And one of the things we try to do is share the vast wealth of knowledge that the expert members of the Movable Type community have gained in their years of blogging.

Fortunately, Rebecca’s not just doing that by writing books. Take her fantastic series of interviews of Bloggers on Blogging. From Glenn Reynolds’ work on Instapundit to Heather Armstrong’s blogging on Dooce to Jason Kottke’s venerable Kottke.org, many of the biggest names in blogging talk about what has helped their sites take off, how they use Movable Type to update their sites every day, and other insights that only come from experience.

One of the best examples is the recent interview with Bruce Schneier. His Schneier on Security blog is one of the most popular English-language blogs in the world, and as has been noted, it’s a great example of how a blog can help you build your career. As Rebecca says:

If you’re interested in using your blog to advance your professional reputation, it’s worth studying Bruce’s Blend—blogging, writing, and speaking—to guide your own efforts.

We’ll be keeping our eyes peeled for future interviews, and if you find other resources that we should be sharing with the community, just let us know.