AdvisorBits

If anyone's been looking (and I know of three... a vast number relatively speaking) over the past week or so, some changes have been happing to the style and to a lesser degree the layout of AdvisorBits. This is not a totally original design. I am still using Movable Type's default templates (mostly) and the stylesheet is taken more directly than you might imagine from the "Stormy" style that is supplied with Movable Type.

The big changes are how posts are selected for display on the main page, and changing the <div> with the id "links" on the right side of the page.

I write about things as I am inspired. Inspiration often comes to me when my clients ask questions or raise issues. Although I am really commmitted to keeping this site fresh, I do not have a firm "I will post something every day, or every week" kind of schedule.

That is one of the reasons I removed the calendar. I have also changed the "<MTEntries>" from the default of showing the last few days as configured through the MT interface; to showing the last three entries without regard for the age of the posts. The code for this is in the "index template" and it looks like:

<MTEntries lastn="3">

I've also used a couple of CSS tricks to make the "links" <DIV> appear more like a navigation area. Previously I though it looked like, well, the right hand side of the page. I have put a border on all four sides of the area, instead of just one dotted line visually separating the primary content from the navigation. I have also used the frequently misunderstood position:relative in order to tie the navigation box visually into the whole page. It still breaks if the user agent viewing window is too narrow. (Your browser doesn't have enough pixels, its not my problem.) Here's the changes I made to the MT Stormy style sheet with regard to <div id="links">:

#links { position:relative; left:-80px; background:#ccc; margin:5em 0 0 0; width:160px; padding:5px; border: 1px solid #630; }

It should be noted that we're still validating.

And one day I know I'll get rid of all the warnings too. As always, your comments are welcome. Next on the list of improvements is an about page, a privacy page, and some new stuff on the navigation area.

Dialog: a conversation between two or more persons; an exchange of ideas and opinions -from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, ca 1965

From its earliest beginnings, the Internet has been about sharing information. The earliest chunks of "Internet" allowed the mainframes at four different universities in the US to communicate with each other. If you had access to those machines, you could share resources of the other machines.

Years later the World Wide Web has made this ability to exchange information more accessible to a wider range of people. The increase in availability of bandwidth and inexpensive web hosting in the late 90's and early years of this century allowed businesses of all sizes to take advantage of the Internet to communicate with their customers and market their products and services.

Personal web sites have long been a part of the Internet. If you have ever seen an Apache configuration file, you know "personal" home pages have long been a part of the culture. If you're the kind of person like me who draws generalizations about culture from web server configurations files. Until recently they tended to be set up once and infrequently maintained. Some people who work on the Internet a lot would update their personal pages frequently, other personal pages would languish.

Blogs are the natural next-step in the evolution of the Internet culture

Blogs empower any individual who wants to say something. And not just those who have decided to create a blog. This blog and most others encourage comments from the readers. In this way everyone can have a voice in the dialog.

In the past year we have seen "blog" as the most looked up word at Merriam Webster's OnLine, http://www.m-w.com/info/04words.htm, bloggers were the ABC News People of the Week, People of the Year (whatever that means) http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/PersonOfWeek/, and it is rumored they were in the running for Time’s person (sic) of the year. Bloggers were accredited press at both the major US political parties' conventions this year if there's any remaining doubt as to how much a part of our greater culture they have become.

I'm excited that this thing I have been fooling around with for a couple years is getting more exposure, that there's a buzz around technology that I’m involved with. I hope over the next year, we'll see bloggers all over the world engaged in constructive open and free dialog. I wonder what something like that will bring.

The nice folks at Movable Type have put together an excelent reference for fighting SPAM in MT weblog comments. The document is both informational, and instructive. They explain in plain terms how SPAMMERs operate and get around some things we try to do. It's understandable these days when systems adminstrators get frustrated and just want to take the most drastic actions possible; it's just not always a good thing. MT acknowledges this and fights against the urge by giving pros and cons of various methods in a balanced way.

And most importantly they provide specific advice wiuth regard to MT Blogs and comments. I had not followed all the advice, but now I have. The number of SPAM went from about 50 yesterday morning to only 3 this morning.

Movable Type Publishing Platform: Guide for Fighting Comment Spam

In the words of Gomer Pyle: "Thank you thank you thank you!"

I would like to add one related note to the discussion. Something I noticed the other day that I needed to fix in a hurry before I got Google Dorked. (More on Google hacking and Google Dorks in a future post.)

Many web statistics programs track referers. Referers are explained in the MT article. As I read this section I remembered that I had recently noticed some SPAM urls in my referers reports. I wondered about this at the time, but moved on.

Now as I was reading the article, it occurs to me, that this reference in my statistics may be another side effect they are hopeing to gain. If I understand it correctly, there is a class of SPAMMER that merely wants the links to appear on a web page, so they can gain ranking in search engines. They never expect anyone to click the link off my blog or yours. They just want their site to rank well.

So back to the statistics page. I wondered about this, and sure enough as I watched connections come into the server ( tail -f /var/log/httpd/access-log ) each time before a comment spam from this one source came in, it would hit the page it was commenting on. (And so getting double refer hits I might add.)

If Google got a hold of my statistics page, and saw that link, the SPAMMER would have scored their goal, and my stats page would be helping them. I put a stop to that.

Recommended additional step to fighting SPAM

Remove public access to your web stats, or at least block Google from indexing them. Most web hosts will allow you to password protect a directory. This is probably the most direct way to resolve the issue. Don't let anyone who doesn't have a reason to see those stats.

If you need to allow public access, at least hide the directory from Google. Use a robots.txt file to keep respectful Spiders out of your web site, and dont make links to your stats pages.

A couple days after I noticed the SPAM in my web statistics, the topic came up over at the Comment Spam Clearinghouse, a blog run by Jay Allen.

Jay was hired this fall by Six Apart, the publishers of MT, presumably because of his blackbelt in AntiSPAM, as demonstrated by the mission critical MT plug-in he wrote, MT-Blacklist.

Jay's post is about a script that scrapes the spammers out of your web server's access logs. I'm not sure that I agree with this, it strikes me as incorrect from a standpoint of wanting accurate statistics about how my web server is used. As I mentioned, I think its more appropriate to restrict public access to those statistics pages. Besides, I can't stand to discard data- I'm a hopeless data packrat.

I have noticed a marked increase in comment SPAM since I posted the other entry. I think it must be coincidental, because to believe otherwise would be to think that one of my very few precious readers is a SPAMMER.

InformationWeek > Weblogs > The Weblog Question > January 31, 2005

This article looks at who owns the content on the weblogs we all love to read. It seems reasonable to me that a blog which is published on the web server's of the company is the property of the company. In fact it is this kind of thinking that made me an independant consultant. The author goes on to describe a number of cases where the ownership of content is ambiguous, and even a few where big corporations do not assert copyright over the blogs of their employees.

The article presents a well rounded overview of some of the legal issues surrounding ownership, but it was this quote that I thought both my blogging and document imaging friends would appreciate.

"Forrester envisions a day when new employees on their first day will be handed a sheet of paper with their phone number, E-mail address--and a URL for their blog," analyst Charlene Li observed in the report. That day is closer than you think."

Sheet of paper?

I was researching installation instructions for Movable Type, and I got a little off track. I came across this resource for "Free drop-in styles for Movable Type" over at Style Monkey.

I couldn't easily figure out the monkey's name to give the author credit. If you stop by you may want to wish them encouragement on their impending graduation from college while you grab a style sheet to use with the default Movable Type version 3 templates.

I recommend beginning MT bloggers start out with the default templates. They are a good starting point for semantic markup of entries. You can build templates from scratch as I have several times, but even on those occasions I used snips of code directly from the default templates.

I was doing a little search engine research on the word "blogging", and I was pretty suprised to notice that according to Overture there were 120 searches for "fired for blogging" in April of 2005.

Don't believe me? Check for yourself: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Once I thought about it a little I was amused. I am an independant contractor for a variety of reasons including my desire to be free from concerns like this.

BuzzMachine: Dell Archives I was attracted to this category archive at the Buzzmachine. I have recently had conversations with people in the networking IT profession who have also told me horror stories about doing business with Dell.

I actually have had a few support issues with Dell myself, but I usually let them slide. My issues are never simple and they, by virtue of their size and purchasing power, are severely handicapped in dealing with actual people. Its all a trade off.

I would like to give you a detailed report on the state of blogging today.

But such a post from me would be redundant since David Silfry, the founder of Technorati, who knows so much more about the subject is writing just such a report, and he's got spiffy graphs too. David is in the midst of a multipart series of posts presenting up to the minute statistics about blogs and analysis of what the data represents.

Check out the reports on his blog, Sifry's Alerts.

• Part 1 : Blog Growth
• Part 2 : Posting Volume
• Part 3 : Tags and Tagging
• Part 4 : Spam and Fake Blogs
• Part 6 : The A-List and the Long Tail

I got a little panicked when I read Ian Kennedy's report from the first day of the business blog summit on his blog Flashpoint. He makes a lot of points with liberal linkage to additional information, and I always feel overwhelmed when presented with that much new information in an area where my knowledge is still developing. (I am also a little intimidated by certain diners because of their book like menus.)

As a consultant who is exploring the small business use of blogs, I felt like I should be a lot more familiar with at more of the names and ideas he mentioned.

AdvisorBits: Rebuilding like I say it should be done ... meanwhile four months later.

The new JSW4.NET site is published, powered entirely by MT and more or less an experimental platform for examining how certain search engines look at keywords, at least compared to how I look at them.

Of course, at about the same time that I did this, MT 3.2 came out; this version has support for "basename" of a file which would save one field. In the current scheme which I developed under 3.16, the extended entry holds the base name. The changes I will make are not limited to new features, there is plenty of room for making the work I did even better.

Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

I have been a fan of Nielsen's lists since I first saw them in the 90's. My own philosophy is similar to his, and I use his work to justify my own advice on a regular basis. I like the way he sums up a key benefit of weblogs:

One of a weblog's great benefits is that it essentially frees you from "Web design." You write a paragraph, click a button, and it's posted on the Internet. No need for visual design, page design, interaction design, information architecture, or any programming or server maintenance.

As I reviewed the list I found AdvisorBits to be in violation of a few rules. 1 and 2 (author bio and photo) can be remedied fairly easily. I am aware of rule 3 although not all my titles are as "correct" as this post's.

I love obscure bits of information about words and names. Today I was looking over the About Feeds page at Six Apart and I noticed a little box that explains the corporation's name. The page on feeds is pretty comprehensive, if clearly focused on promoting the product's ability to create feeds (XML) as well as any other text format like HTML, or XHTML, if you are interested in learning more about this technology I recommend at least glancing at the article.

Why "Six Apart?" In honor of our two co-founders who were born exactly six days apart.

As a husband who is classically horrible about remembering dates, I hope for Ben's sake that his birthday is the one that falls six days before Mena's.

Its the truth and Disqualified is what I should be for taking so long to pass on the link to the 2006 Bloggies. Now its too late for you to vote, but not too late to see all the runners up before the winners are announced.

Here's another article I thought was interesting not only because of my own moderate interest in gaming but the author's name is similar to mine. Be sure to check out the rest of The Escapist ezine too.

Both of these links came to me from a new blogger, CH who writes about cooking... and just about anything else that comes to her mind.

I think I know, but its not really what Tom Smith at InformationWeek thinks it is.

One less positive development when it comes to online news and journalism has been the ever-more-fuzzy distinction between blogs--with their lack of fact checking, their flame-oriented reader comments, and other shortcomings--and the journalistic work that drives daily newspapers. Particularly for twenty-somethings and those even younger, I wonder whether they can recognize the difference between blogs and the more traditional forms of reporting and journalism in newspapers.

I barely know where to begin. First lets stop kidding ourselves. Newspapers have opinions and it shows in their journalism, even if all the facts they give us are checked. And lets not kid ourselves there either, from the list at Wikipedia here were a couple of quotes I thought demonstrated the point pretty well:

Her editors had long suspected her of fabulism, but were slow to address it and mistakenly gave the responsibility of fact-checking her work to an editor who was off on the day of the week that one of [the author's] two weekly columns was due.

or this more recent classic, I've removed the specific names, but I think you will all remember this episode, it was pretty big national news for a few weeks:

...testimony from Times watchers and employees disgruntled with [the editors'] autocratic management style showed the duo had fast-tracked [the reporter] for promotion, despite warnings from other employees about [the reporter] erratic behavior and high error rate.

And if that's not bad enough, who turned these guys in?

The Associated Press moved a story on February 1 [2005] with a picture of what appeared to be an American soldier held hostage in Iraq. The story stated that the captors would kill the soldier in 72 hours unless Iraqi prisoners were freed.

Within hours after the story was published, bloggers who noticed that the photo looked odd figured out that the "hostage" was in fact a G.I. Joe Air Force special operations doll named "Cody."

The hoax, which ran on the heels of Memogate at CBS, further sullied the media's reputation for fact-checking. United States Central Command had not reported any soldiers missing at the time. Furthermore, some bloggers noted that the "hostage" was allowed to keep his equipment and grenades, which is not something that militants experienced enough to capture a U.S. soldier would do.

Even if that wasn't enough, I think the average twenty year old today is hip enough to get their news from a far wider range of sources than I did in 1980 something... And if they aren't smart enough, how is that the fault of bloggers? I find it ironic (did I use it correctly Ann?) that Smith writes for information week which is a product of CMP media, a company that proudly proclaims its mission:

CMP Media is the premier provider of access, insight and actionable programs that connect sellers to buyers in the technology, healthcare and entertainment industries. Through its market-leading brand portfolio, CMP has earned the trust of industry professionals who regularly read its publications, visit its websites, attend its events and use its services.

Which is to say, "We sell advertising." (There's nothing wrong with that.)

You will notice I don't really argue with Smith's complaints about the accuracy of blogs, I had that conversation in my garden with Jerome Yavarkovsky in the mid 90's. As a librarian he had used the Internet since its "academic only" days. Jerome pointed out that one of the main challenges that would be faced as we entered the age of the commercial Internet would be verifying the accuracy of information we found there. I am not surprised that blogs find themselves this situation too.

I think the biggest problem blogs face are being all lumped together in the mind of the public. The range of accuracy is as great as the range of topics. Its still up to the reader to use their mind, the days when you can believe everything you read are long gone, no matter where you read it.

Furthermore, at the moment I do not think blog describes the end product as much as it describes the process of publishing, and the accessibility and capabilities of the tools. In short, a blog is about the freedom for anyone to publish to have a small voice, and about how the readers can interact with them. The word does not describe a media segment as Smith has used it, rather (I hate to use the word...) I see it as a zeitgeist of the specific times in which we live.

I am pretty excited to be going to the Blogging for Business Seminar in New York City on May 25th. If you're a business interested in attending, you should contact Six Apart really soon, we are told attendance is limited. The more public afternoon session is sponsored by Attensa. Attensa makes a Business Class RSS product which I will be interested to hear them talk about. (That is how far out in the country I live, and how rarely I get to professional seminars in person... I am even looking forward to the pitch!)

Mostly I will be excited to meet some new fellow ProNetters, and to see my old friend Jessie. I read the stuff these guys write, and it will be interesting to put a face to it and hear them speak their thoughts. Will it be different than what I thought I read?

The other day, I made a post, which along with a healthy rant against some magazine journalist who had lumped "blogs" all together into a mass of media without accuracy or ethics, contained a sactamoneous statement of belief about how blogs defined the sprit of our times.

Today I read an article that takes a bit of a more in-depth look at the definition of what a new media company is, by way of looking at it in a larger context of what defines a media company. The gazillion-dollar question | Economist.com They made a lot of the points I wished I had, I think it is worth reading.

Many small audiences are as good for advertisers as few large audiences, and indeed may be better. This has huge implications for content, turning it into one long continuum — from professional to amateur, from blockbuster to subculture niche. Chris Anderson of Wired magazine calls this stretched statistical distribution “the long tail”.

At JSW4.NET Internet Hosting Services for Small Business we just finished another web site managed using MT for my friend and picture framing specialist Jeff Risley. Jeff owns Park Row Gallery, and he is having his twentieth year anniversary this year. I used this opportunity to employ MT both in the primary site, and with far less customization in a news site. This lets him manage the content on his site very easily, and gives him an easy way to post regular news items.

I have been thinking about RSS for a long time. I wanted to write an article about it, but two things have prevented me to date.

1) Its a boring and complex topic with a lot of semi-technical discussion of competing standards that probably wouldn't be interesting to my customers, or wouldn't be useful to my fellow hackers since everyone else has already written a blog post about it.

2) Inertia.

At the business blogging seminar I met Matthew Bookspan who is the director of product management for Attensa, who make a cool new product for consuming RSS and similar data. As he explained to us, one of the problems is that you soon find too much information via feeds. His company helps you to manage and prioritize that information. (I am going to buy a copy of his product and write a future post about this "attention data measuring" aspect his product which is kind of interesting to me.) This helped me to break the inertia.

I hope to write about some additional thoughts that have been bouncing around up there since the conference. As usual, the doing comes easier to me than the writing about, but I promise to try.

There are many products that help us to manage feeds, and perhaps as important as managing, to share feeds with others. There are online aggregators that allow users to subscribe to hundreds of feeds, and share those feeds with other people interested in similar information. Sort of like ones own personal newspaper, sourced from millions of available news services.

Because the services are are online, there is no need for users to download and install software.

Additionally, these services can show in real-time certain sites on the Internet that are being most frequently linked to. Although it has little or no value to the average web surfer[1], this thing makes really cool graphs of the HTML DOM of any given web page, and additionally has made the inventor topical enough to get interviewed on the BBC. And Bloglines made it the most linked site of 5/30/2006.

[1] To tell the truth, although I as a web professional understand what is being rendered and I am fascinated watch it I am not exactly sure what the use is either.

I was pleased to see this come in my RSS reader today: New Color Scheme Tool - Brainstorms and Raves. Shirley E Kaiser doesn't know it, and I don't know her or I might mention it, but she was one of my motivations for getting involved with blogging.

I'm also a painter and interested in color so I was glad to follow her link to GenoPal, a Windows software tool for making color pallets. There is also a free program called GenoSwatch on the GenoMetri - GenoColor web site .

There are a lot of color pickers available, I have mentioned more and Shirley has a whole page of them. I am not quite sure what they mean when they say "All presently available color tools and rules start with the color of an object or the color of light. GenoColor starts with your mind." (Emphasis added, because that was the part I didn't understand.) I will say that GenoColor does not work like any other color picker tool I have ever worked with, and its worth a look for that reason alone.

Almost a year ago, I said Dell should start blogging.

If I was King of Dell for a day, I would make all the executives start blogs to communicate with real users.

And they have. The blog is called ono2one and the tag-line is "Direct Conversations with Dell". So far the content is OK, they have mentioned at least one problem and said they are working on it. I think the "Rules of Engagement" anticipates a bit too much of a confrontational conversation. The whole thing struck me as too public-relations and corporate.

For instance, they mention the new gaming platform in a recent post. (Which I note seems to be branded Dell, although I NEVER remember seeing anything like that before they bought AlienWare, but they say it is unrelated.) Unfortunately its all about the supply chain and upcoming availability, and how the urban legends just aren't true. I don't do video stuff, so I can't comment on the the third item which was about MP4 files. They should really have some wannbe-uber gamer like myself paid to play and blog about the latest cool toys from Dell. If anyone at Dell is reading this, you can contact me by clicking the javascript contact thingy in the page navigation at the top.

I no longer want to even contemplate the difficulty of being King, but if they asked me to consult, I would tell them to loosen up a little and have some fun.

The MT 3.31 Plug-in Compatibility List

Elise Bauer, author of Learning Movable Type has published the PCL. (Do you remember the NT4.0 HCL? If it wasn't there, it wasn't going to work with NT.) I found this more recent and relevant document while doing some last minute research before doing upgrades this week. If you are upgrading your MT blog, you probably want to take a quick look to see if your favorite plug-ins are on the list.

Several months ago, I noticed that the New York Times had redesigned their website to viewed by a monitor with 1024 x 768 pixels. For years I have noticed more users setting their monitors to this resolution, instead of 800 x 600, and I guess it was a matter of time before we had to reassess the lowest common factor for design of web pages in that regard.

On Monday, Jakob Nielsen wrote a piece for Alertbox stating that it is recommended to optimize web pages for that screen resolution. If Jakob says so it must be true. He talks about the need for liquid layouts, but I think once the genie is out of the bottle, stylists and designers alike will probably start making the designs fixed.

You may have noticed a little new life has been put into the Advisor Bits Regional Web Directory, and I just used the new Feeds.lite widget to put the last five listings on the front page. (At the top of the right column on the front page.)

Carol Hargis who also works with JSW4.NET has recently been adding new links to businesses and organizations in Chatham NY.

I mentioned attending a business seminar in May, and now Six Apart has scheduled a new series of Business Blogging Seminars all over the country in the coming months. These events are not just for ProNet members, but are geared towards the general business public with a different industry focus for each city.

If you attend you will hear about current business blogging case studies, and of course a healthy dose of Six Apart self promotion. (Did I mention Anil Dash will be at all the seminars?)

I really enjoyed meeting some of the people who will be speaking at these upcoming seminars when I went to NYC in May, and it was quite telling to hear Anil speak, after having read so many things he's written. I will probably attend several of the events on the East Coast, and I will invite some clients to go along with me to NYC and Boston. I think that the presentations were great, and really demonstrated clearly some of the simple benefits of blogging.

If you can get to one of the seminars for a day trip, it will be time well spent. If you wait for the last minute they will charge you double. Which is to say, it's half off if you register in the next week or so.

About a day after I posted an announcement about the seminars, they filled in NYC and Boston. Sorry about that, I am told they are planning another series of events in the first quarter of the new year. This report is from the seminar in DC last week.

Actually the focus of this seminar was supposed to be Politics and Advocacy. Since it was held in DC, so close to an election, I think "Inside the Beltway Bloggin" would have been funnier. I was disappointed that Anil was sick, but pleased to have a chance meet and listen to what the pinch pitch person from Six Apart, Marissa Levinson, had to say.

In fact the main reason I went is to hear the pitch again. Sometimes in my world of servers and interfaces and dependencies, combined with search engines, feeds, and templates the picture becomes too complicated. That probably comes across in my own pitch to prospective business bloggers. Its good to hear the basic reasons for business blogs recited occasionally.

A business blog can be modeled on:

1. An outwardly facing newsletter.


2. As a simple internal collaboration tool, or sort of ad hoc groupware.


3. A way for businesses to extend their reach, or the number of people who hear their message.

More links to your blog means more visitors. Bloggers check to see who is linking to them; if they like the blog that links to them, they may link to it. A blogroll is a list of links to other bloggers. (You need not take my word, it says so over at Learning Movable Type.)

That is the basic logic behind a blogroll. A nice young fellow Arvind Satyanarayan has written a full featured commercial plug-in for Movable Type which helps users manage blogrolls, and has nice features, such tracking the last update to the blogs on your blogroll. If you need features, check it out.

But, maybe you don't want to run a program that requires PHP. Maybe you don't feel like paying for a plug-in. Maybe you won't want to give your email address just to download the plug-in to evaluate it.

Maybe, like me, you just appreciate the beauty of a simple hack.

There has been a lot of talk on ProNet the past few days about the CMS UI. Content Management System User Interface, or the part of the software that the author's of blogs use to post their blog entries. I for one, wish that the interface would work without JavaScript. It is not that I don't like JavaScript, it is just that do like a choice.

But that is not what this post is about.

I just got Live Writer from Microsoft, and I am writing this post using that program. I downloaded it for free, and I am sure they want me to do the Live Spaces thing, but I am using it to test posting to MT.

So far so good. It gives me a nice WYSIWYG view of the blog post as I edit it. It was a little picky about some things as I set it up, but I tried enough times and eventually it hooked up to my old (Linux) server and in just a minute now, we'll see if it posts.

Well whaddya know?

Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users has asked the 21st century metaphysical question:

If my Cingular cell phone sends me a MySpace alert and I'm not there to get it, do I exist? But email, IMs, social networking, and blogs are nothing compared to the thing that may finally cause time as we know it to cease. I'm talking, of course, about Twitter.

I agree with her assessment: With all this information input in life today, the time between interruptions is rapidly approaching zero.

Although I confess a single visit some years ago to MySpace, and a single hour (well, OK, ninety minutes) of my life I will never get back at YouTube I'm going to call her advice on this good, and skip Twitter for as long as I can avoid it.

(And please don't forget to subscribe to the AdvisorBits feed.)

I have never really used Flash for anything. My attitudes and knowledge of it all stem from experiences gained around 2000. When I read Dan Webb's post about how he was going to start to learn more about the newer versions of Flash, I had a kind of smart-aleck response: Ya sure, if it runs under X Windows on Linux.

But Dan has a lot of comments on this post.

The comments point out that these things are never as black and white as that. Theres a lot more to this subject that I don't know about and his commenters provided even more links to read. They definitely add to the value of Dan's content.

I regularly encourage new bloggers to encourage comments, and respond to comments. I encourage readers to make comments where they feel they can add to the discussion.

A few months ago, I had a blogroll on this blog. A blogroll is the list of the blogs I read every day. I had some sample code (that turns out to have been broken), and when I updated the blog the last time, that stuff disappeared somehow anyway. (Ooops.)

June being what it is for me this year, I was on my way out the door this afternoon, to make it to an appointment that I inexplicably (and inexcusably) missed yesterday when my friend Eric called to task for a couple minutes of help implementing my instructions. (Did I mention they were broken?)

Well, the list of blogs I read everyday, is at Bloglines. (Which I use to keep up to date with my feeds.) So wouldn't you know they got a little snip of JavaScript you can put into your Index Template, and it will magically render your Bloglines folder hierarchy in the side bar.

If you have a Bloglines account, you can do this too. Go to Home page and click on Share. This will take you to a wizard that generates the HTML you can paste into your MT Index Template.

And now you know what I read every day.

I have a show of paintings opening at a local gallery tomorrow night. It will be up for most of the month of July, so I encourage you to stop by and see it. I have just updated my personal website to include links to a catalog I have made of the exhibition and an artist statement.

I have been making web sites for businesses almost since before Al Gore invented the Internet, and my latest project really brought some fundamental issues into focus and addressed them pretty well, if i do say so myself. I have read about and seen dozens of "the new technologies" (of the moment) that will "revolutionize the way your company does business" over the years.

It seems to me though, my small business clients are still asking two questions which are much more foundational than the use of any individual web site technology. "How will people find my web site?" and "How can I change my own web site?"

The first question is answered in a variety of ways, all of the good answers boil down to creating a quality web site, and promoting it. As a web developer, I strongly believe that a business person knows their own customers better than I do, and so while I can guide the business owner in developing a quality site, the second question is really the interesting one.

Pandora's box is open.

Bridges have been burned.

Things will never be the same.

Its the first day of the rest of our lives.

Insert silly metaphor here.

Anil Dash said

As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose.

Sure enough there's a GNU license in the Nightly Build.

And I am very pleased.

Movable Type Open Source, MTOS, has been released as a stable version (4.1). No more nightlies for us. This is a good thing, as it can now be safely consumed by a wider audience. (I don't know about you, but "here's what I did today" lost its charm after I couldn't paste it to the refrigerator anymore.)

And there's also a commercial version MovableType 4.1, for professionals or organizations who want direct support from the publisher or access to the "professional pack" which includes among other features the ability to define "Custom Fields".

I support both of these products in my web development, and business web hosting services. In fact, the next post you see on AdvisorBits may well be from 4.1 on those hosting platforms. The whole fast cgi (fcgid) thing is way cool, but really overkill on my own blog, so I am getting ready to host this blog and its related friends on the shared servers for a while.

The latest version of Movable Type, MT4, comes in three distinct flavors, plus an enterprise version. Since I work with small businesses, and individuals, I thought I would take a minute to go over the various features and license terms as I understand them.

MTOS (Movable Type Open Source)

I have seen the company call this the "core" product, that which underlies all their other versions. And that seems to be decent description. All the normal stuff is there: Catagories, Entries, Periodic Archives, Comments, and Trackbacks. The new and very useful: Page and Folder appear along with an Asset Management tool. (The Asset Management was pretty weak in 4.0, although the community seems to be saying it has improved a bit in 4.1)

This version has a GPL, which means that you may use it for any purposes, including commercial, i.e. business. This version is available from the publisher free of charge. The Movable Type Community site (.org) has more information.

MTP (Movable Type Personal)

Movable Type without the Professional Pack. I am not sure if there are any functional differences between this version and the Open Source version. If there are I haven't noticed them, and no one has made it clear in the stuff I have read.

This version is for non-commercial use by a single user. It is available free of charge from the publisher on their commercial web site.

MT (Movable Type (TM). )

Movable Type with the Professional Pack, and including support from the publisher. The professional pack includes features such as Custom Fields, and the Universal Website Template sets. Template sets are a new feature that is implemented in all versions of the product, Universal Website Template Set is currently only available to those who purchase it with the Professional Pack that comes with MT (TM). With it small businesses could create a simple web presence in a matter of hours.

The commercial version is licensed based on the number of active users, i.e. authors, and starts around $300 for 5 users; which includes support from the publisher for a single user for 12 months.

Movable Type 4 gives us a rich vocabulary of information elements from which to construct small business web sites. As I write this the ultimate irony is that I am using version 3.xx to tell my clients about a feature of 4.x; I really must get this blog cut over to the new version.

An Entry in MT is sometime called a post. This is because MT was originally weblogging (blogging) software. Blog posts, or entries are sequential over time. The last one you write is more current than the previous. Over time they will both become history, archived as it were, but no longer front page news, so to speak. For many business web sites, blog entries serve the same function as news.

Entries can be organized into Categories, and they are placed in chronological Archives by default.

A Page in MT has only existed as a separate informational entity since the latest version, 4.x. Pages are similar in their scope and general information make-up (such as title, content, keywords field, etc.) to a news item but they are more timeless. The information they contain is very slowly changing if at all.

Pages can be organized into Folders.

Both Entries and Pages can be indexed using logical devices called Tags.