We're pleased to announce the Beta release of Movable Type 4. With more than 50 new features, MT4 will enable you to quickly start a blog, easily manage entire blogging websites and better connect with your audience.
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All recent versions of Movable Type include a number of plugins for blocking spam, including a set of plugins called SpamLookup. We wanted to update you about a third-party service that’s affected the performance of one of the plugins, along with some easy steps you can take to fix the issue.
Recently, an IP blacklist service known as Blitzed ceased its operations. Movable Type’s SpamLookup plugin uses this service to process incoming comments and TrackBacks to determine if they are spam or not. With Blitzed shut down, a lot of you might be experiencing delays when publishing your readers’ comments.
Though we’re sorry to see Blitzed go (and thank the team for their efforts), the good news is that a free replacement is available. The SpamHaus Project has been in operation for over 9 years and has a long track record of providing excellent protection against known spammers. In addition to their technology that they allow people to use for free, Spamhaus works with Law Enforcement and cyber-crimes teams worldwide, helping them not only to block these miscreants, but also to bring them to justice.
Adding Spamhaus to your spam filtering rules is straightforward; You’ll need to make a small change to SpamLookup’s configuration. To fix follow these simple instructions:
That’s it — your sites’s visitors should experience faster commenting times immediately, and your blog will keep blocking known spammers. If you need more information on fighting spam on your blog, take a look at the Movable Type Spam-Fighting resources on the community wiki, or contact Movable Type support for assistance.
There are lots of discussions about how newspapers need to evolve, and
many of them focus on the lessons traditional news outlets can learn
from blogs — how to update more frequently, accept submissions and
comments from readers, or how to make archived content easier to
discover and share.
Well, the Buckinghamshire Advertiser
in southeast England has taken those lessons to heart in relaunching
its web presence: The newspaper’s site is now published entirely with
Movable Type. And that makes the Buckinghamshire Advertiser today’s
Movable Type Featured Blog.
There are often debates about this sort of thing — if you’re using a tool like Movable Type, which is platform designed for blogging, but it’s being used as a general content management system, is the output still a blog? Our answer: Who cares? The important thing is that the Advertiser’s staff has an easy way to share news and updates with their community, and the Buckinghamshire community has a simpler way to keep up to day. The Press Gazette offers an astute analysis:
Trinity Mirror has clearly realised that properly customised blogging tools can do everything that a much more expensive content management system would be able to. The web developers and software houses that produce complex, expensive CMSs should take note.
Just as sites like thePlatform and Seed Magazine show us, content that’s created with blogging tools doesn’t have to look like a traditional blog. All that matters is that a site connects with its audience in way that’s meaningful and useful. The Trinity Mirror team that’s relaunched the Advertiser has achieved exactly that — and the new Buckinghamshire Advertiser is ample evidence.
Today’s Movable Type Featured Blog is a special one: It’s Ze Frank’s The Show,
one of the most popular video blogs in the world, which is signing off
tomorrow in the end of an amazing one-year run that’s culminated with
Ze being widely recognized as one of the key innovators in the young
medium.
Now, Ze’s How To Dance Properly was already knocking around as one of the then-young blogosphere’s favorite links half a decade ago when Movable Type was first created. And I had the chance to see Ze’s first public presentation at the Gel Conference a few years ago, where his skills as a performer were already strongly in evidence. So Ze Frank’s bonafides as someone who really gets the web were already well-established long before The Show ever launched; In fact, Ze’s been posting updates in Movable Type and embedding videos on his site for years. But what’s impressive is how well he’s understood the unique artistic requirements of the nascent video blogging medium, and used experience from one era of blogging to help kick-start a new one.
So as Ze gets ready to retire The Show, it seems there is a parallel to a comedic talent who helped define an earlier video medium’s first forays: Lucille Ball.
Because, though there are lots of video bloggers doing great work
today, only one year ago there had been very few breakout stars. And
many of those who were creating video blogs had simply tried to bring
their text blogs into the video world.
The same was true of television in the early days — radio stars were often reading off the same scripts they’d used on the air, only now they were doing it in front of cameras. But I Love Lucy helped define a vocabulary that was native to the new medium. The sitcom genre that the show invented was uniquely of, and uniquely for video on television. And Ze’s Show shares many of the same traits as that show: It’s full of a strongly physical sense of humor, a canny understanding of how to frame and feature an extremely expressive face, and it has a pacing and timing that makes all the work that comes before it seem downright languid.
So, while it’s bittersweet to be featuring a blog that’s nearing its end, it’s also wonderful to recognize someone who’s already become a huge influence on a whole new generation of video bloggers. And it’s good to acknowledge one more similarity between a pioneering television show and a pioneering video blog — they both know how to exit gracefully while at the top of their game. Congratulations to Ze, and we can’t wait to see what he shows us next.
Climate change has been a… hot topic in the news, and even at the
Oscars, for some time. But a lot of people who are concerned about the
issue just want to know some steps they can take to help as
individuals. TerraPass is an organization that lets you calculate your
“carbon footprint”, or the total of the carbon dioxide emissions we
create with daily activities such as driving, electricity use, or
flying. And TerraPass provides the opportunity to help offset that old
technology by investing in new technology that helps better the
environment.
But communicating about complex issues around climate change such as
renewable resources, investment in industrial efficiency and
alternative energy sources is a tough task. So TerraPass uses their
Movable Type-powered TerraBlog
to explain the heart of their business: It’s not just a one-way channel
for the company to talk about these issues, but a forum that supports a
community of people who are asking the tough questions. And the company
delivers their blog to their readers by leveraging Movable Type to
notify their 20,000 email subscribers about new entries, and talk about
relevant news of the day.
According to the staff of Terrapass “Movable Type is the core of how we do business.” It’s a ringing endorsement of the value a blog can add to your company’s relationships. If you’re using Movable Type to tell your community about your story, submit your site as a Movable Type Featured Blog and we’ll be glad to help you get the word out.
Adobe’s Apollo project
is an ambitious undertaking: A rich application platform that combines
the ubiquity and power of Adobe’s Flash and PDF formats with the user
experience standards set by modern Ajax applications. With the release
of today’s alpha test version
of the platform, the team has reached an important milestone. But for
the product to succeed, it’s going to take a lot of conversations with
the developers, businesses, and eventually the actual users of Apollo
for the platform.
With the success of such a huge project relying on a strong dialogue between Adobe and its community, we had to mark the release of the Apollo alpha by making Mike Downey’s blog our Movable Type Featured Blog. Mike is the Senior Product Manager for Apollo at Adobe, and he’s been blogging on Movable Type as part of the Adobe Blogs community for years, including back in the Macromedia days before the companies merged. And the same is true for other Apollo team members — folks like Mike Chambers are must-subscribe bloggers for any fan of Adobe technology.
So if you want to see what’s coming down the road from Adobe, be sure
to take a look at blogs like Mike’s, and then head over to the Adobe
Labs site to grab the code and start hacking. But don’t be shy about
feedback — the Adobe team has distinguished themselves from day one by
really listening to the comments and blog posts that people write about
their products.
Learning Movable Type
isn’t just today’s Movable Type Featured blog, it’s a cornerstone of
our community and one of the best resources that exists for, well,
learning Movable Type.
Elise Bauer has been maintaining the site for years as an indispensable reference for all of us who spend our days working and playing with the platform. Along with her collaborators Jesse Gardner and Arvind Satyanarayan (whom you might remember from our post a couple of weeks ago), Elise has been posting tutorials and how-tos that explain even the most technical concepts in perfectly understandable plain English.
But what’s really exciting is what the team’s done now: They haven’t just redesigned the site, they’ve reimagined it, as a truly community-driven effort.
Everyone in the community who has something to share is welcome to
publish their articles on the site and become a contributor. Most
fittingly, Learning Movable Type shows off what Movable Type itself can
really do: check out the smart organization of the site, grouped by topic (categories) or by subject (tags) or by contributor (authors). And new technology features like a community search make it easy to find the best Movable Type resources, regardless of where they are on the web.
We’re really excited to see the renewed level of energy around the Movable Type community these days, so it’s most appropriate that one of the flagship resources for the community has been reborn. But don’t take our word for it — go check out the all-new Learning Movable Type, maybe even contribute an article of your own, and see exactly what makes the site so special.
The Morning News
is a stalwart bastion of great writing, one of those sites that really
show off the potential for independent publishers to be the equal of
any other media in the world. Though it’s informed by a New York
sensibility, the Morning News team has consistently been broad-reaching
both in its choice of topics and in the talent that it recruits to help
write for the site.
Of course, we’re partial to The Morning News because they’ve always been powered by Movable Type, and even once had some articles contributed by our co-founder Mena Trott. But half a decade after the site started publication, the influence of TMN’s combination of beautiful aesthetics and smart writing is undeniable. You might want to make a few minutes with TMN and a cup of coffee part of your routine if it isn’t already.
We’re proud to make The Morning News the first in our series of Movable Type Featured sites. And we’re happy to be bringing back a tradition of featuring great MT blogs on our site. Submit your Movable Type-powered blog, and we’ll try to feature it in the future.
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