Okay, maybe you’ve got a great sense of style. Then why is your Movable Type blog still using one of the default designs? It’s time to make something that actually communicates a little bit about your own sense of aesthetics.

The good news is, you don’t have to dig into learning CSS or anything fancy just to make a nice-looking site. Try out Arvind Satyanarayan’s Movable Type Style Generator: It works great with the default templates in Movable Type 3.2.

Using the Style Generator, you can create a new design with 1, 2 or 3 columns and your own personal color scheme with just a few clicks. There’s a sample blog that lets you see your changes live as you make them, and if you want to change your style, you just replace your stylesheet with the code that the Generator gives you. The best part is that Arvind only asks for a measly five bucks if you use the service. Of course, you could be a cheapskate and generate your styles for free, but donating will make you feel good, and even better, will make your blogs look great.

Many of us at Six Apart are really big technology geeks, so some of the biggest indirect influences on our work are the endless inventions of Xerox’s famous Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. PARC is credited with inventing technologies such as laser printers, Ethernet, the graphical user interface, and many more. Naturally, they’re at the forefront of using new technologies like blogs as well.

The best public example of their embrace of blogging is the Movable Type-powered PlayOn blog from the PARC team researching the social impacts of massively multiplayer online games.

The work the PlayOn team does in understanding community, social architecture, interactions and culture makes them a natural fit for participating in the blogosphere, where conversation is focused around feedback and interaction. A look at the profiles of the blog’s authors shows a very diverse list of influences and experiences have informed their current work. It’s eye-opening to see how their research into games that seem simple at first glance can reveal some very telling information about how people relate to each other in general, especially online.

Of course, you don’t need to be an expert researcher to get started with Movable Type. It’s easy to collect feedback just by using the built-in commenting features or by tracking who links to your blog. And once you’ve discovered some insights into your own community, you can easily document your own findings and research, whether it’s simple updates to a project or inventing the Next Big Thing like the team at PARC.

We're thrilled to announce the newest, and easiest, way to get started with Movable Type: Yahoo! Small Business web hosting now includes Movable Type. All of us on the Movable Type team have worked with the folks at Yahoo to make this the best experience possible for professionals who want to get started with blogging.

If you sign up for Yahoo! web hosting, you get a reliable, robust web hosting account with hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth and plenty of storage space. But you also get a name you know and trust offering a blogging platform that's the most popular choice for businesses.

Many companies, especially small businesses, are unfamiliar with blogging and might even be a bit apprehensive about getting started. With Yahoo's reliability and Movable Type's reputation, there's now a safe choice for getting started with business blogging.

As many of you know, there are hundreds of plugins in the Movable Type plugin directory through which you can completely customize and modify the way that the application works. This has always been a great strength of the Movable Type platform and we put great effort in every release to give plugins even more ways to enhance the system.

What you may not know is that since the launch of Movable Type 3.2, dozens of plugins built specifically for v3.2 have been created. Some of the new capabilities of these plugins include plugin actions for acting on checked items in a listing screen, UI enhancements thanks to BigPAPI, feedback scoring and Junk processing.

We're happy to announce fourteen new additions to the plugin directory in the last 24 hours including six which are "Built for 3.2" (indicated below):

• MTGoogleMaps
• EntryCategoryEntries
• Update-n-Ping
• Tags.App
• mt-tagslite
• mt-gizmos
• CatEntries
• OpenID Comments (3.2)
• Duplicated TBPing Lookup (3.2)
• Better Entry Preview (3.2)
• Better File Uploader (3.2)
• BanPing2OldEntry Plugin (3.2)
• Delicious Tags (3.2)
• Tagwire

We're always excited to see people building on top of the Movable Type platform and would love to see more. If you're interested in developing a plugin for Movable Type, check out the excellent resources from our Professional Network including the mailing list and regularly published articles by experts.

If you have a new plugin for Movable Type or just know of one that hasn't yet made it into the directory, please submit it and we'll let the world know.

We're proud to announce that Movable Type 3.2 is now available. This release improves upon what is already the most powerful blogging platform by offering a better experience at every step. This new version combines the strengths and innovations you have come to expect from Movable Type over the past four years, boosted by the addition of over 100 unique new features that will help your blogs truly shine.

Best of all, it's a free update for any licensed user of Movable Type 3.x. Personal users will be happy to find that the Free edition now offers unlimited blogs. And personal users who want a multi-user license and access to our famed technical support can now take advantage of a special $30 discount on our Basic and Unlimited editions.

Highlights of New Movable Type 3.2 Features:

• Vastly improved installation and upgrade
• Unlimited blogs for all
• Special $30 discount for Personal Edition
• All your blogs in one place
• The best community management
• Find what you need
• Smart new styles
• A new generation of plugins
• The best support in the business
• Professional backing

In addition to the features listed above, we've made enormous improvements in usability for every common task you perform while blogging, many of which we've described in our list of our 32 favorite features of Movable Type 3.2. What's more, the features that have made Movable Type the platform by which all blog tools are judged are better than ever: Static or Dynamic Publishing (no rebuilds!); Built-in support for multiple authors, blogs, categories, and templates; Automatic archiving and publishing of XML feeds; and better platform support for almost any common operating system or database.

So, how to get started? If you already purchased Movable Type, or downloaded the free version, you'll be able to download the new release for free from your Movable Type account. Otherwise, you can find it on the Pricing and Licensing page. As always, there is a free, unsupported personal version (did we mention unlimited weblogs?) which will satisfy the needs of a large number of personal users.

After that, make sure to follow the the installation and upgrade instructions in the user manual as there have been some significant changes and improvements to the process.

Want some more details on the features we've added, or need one of our cool new badges to tell the world you've stepped up to Movable Type 3.2? Keep reading for details...