I don’t see this reorganization as a sign that Six Apart is in trouble, but a prudent one to do what it can to stay out of it. It’s unfortunate that some are losing their jobs particularly in this time of economic uncertainty. Before I started Appnel Solution, I was left in the same position.
Six Apart has always been fiscally conservative though(sometimes to a fault IMHO) and the shifts in focus and personnel seems logical and are likely to make them more efficient and helps their services business which has been booming from all accounts. That last one, growing services, is a bit concerning to me though since my company is in the same business.
There is much work to be done in the areas of advancing MT as a product, growing the developer community and its core evolution as an open source software project that I hope will not be effected by this reorganization and cut backs.
UPDATE 11/12 @ 11AM: Word is spreading that Byrne Reese who had served as MT’s Product Manager until recently was one of those let go yesterday. This is really disappointing to hear for the MT community and especially Byrne and his family. It’s also a big blow to the community at large IMHO because Byrne was the most active and visible member of Six Apart to engage with the developer community on many levels. Byrne has said he is not leaving the community, but his ability to bridge the internal working of Six Apart and community is already missed.
]]>Today I am officially releasing Feeds.App Lite under an Artistic/GPL license. In other words it is open source.
Google Code repository is here. A download of the plugin can be had from Google or the Feeds.App page.
There is no new functionality in this release. Just the new license.
In related news, I posted a new maintenance distribution of Feeds.App that corrects a typo that reported the plugin as RC4 (release candidate 4). Feeds.App v3 has been finalized code for nearly a year. More importantly, this version also ships with an updated version of XML::Elemental. This updated version addresses a circular reference condition that generates a memory leak. Those running under a persistent environment like FastCGI or mod_perl are highly encouraged to download and install this new distribution.
]]>Both Penelope and Foundry are the continuation of how MTOS can be integrated with the broader open source community.
Penelope is a revised version of my original proposal to take in to account the introduction of Foundry in the broader plan to open source (“CPAN-ize”) MTOS. Since Byrne Reese rightfully pointed out MTOSProjectRoadmap may confuse people, so I code named it “Penelope” after the next generation Trott.
I also posted Foundry which includes some initial work on Milestone 1 of Penelope that I have inserted as an added milestone. I named it Foundry. (The Guttenberg movable type printing press used type pieces which where designed and made by a…)
Any feedback or contributions are welcome on the mtos-dev mailing list or here in the comments.
]]>Before I resume my regular blogging activities here I thought I’d recap some of the noteworthy MT happenings that went down over the past couple of months.
The most significant is the official release of MT 4.2 and the inclusion of the Community Solution with all paid licenses. This community-enabled version has been dubbed Movable Type Pro. MT 4.2 was primarily focused on performance improvements through code optimization, caching, and some smart interface tweaks. The TypePad AntiSpam was later added. The bundling of the Community Solution was a welcome surprise and one that takes MT into something more than just a blogging or simple CMS platform. I highly recommend all users upgrade to this version. It’s really worth it no matter what your situation.
DevLounge coverage is here including some gotchas to upgrading. We also suggest you read up on What’s New, the performance enhancements and how you can take advantage of them in your system. Also be sure to read the MT 4.2 upgrade guide before attempting to do so.
More here from the Industry Standard on the MT 4.2 release
I was involved in a discussion about the future of the MTOS code based and posted an initial plan to the MT wiki. This is something I need to find the time to return to in order to further.
A number of new and interesting plugins have been released.
Byrne Reese released two plugins that Six Apart have been using. Forum Utilities adds features such as promoting comment to an entry, highlighting comments, and closing conversations quickly and easily from the MT interface. This is particularly timely given the wider availability of community features in MT.
The other plugin, SuperPage, from MT’s esteemed product manager, was developed to aid Six Apart’s own documentation efforts and converts a single, massive MT page into a set of easy to navigate pages divided into chapter and section.
For all those wishing to produce a simple iPhone-compatible version of their site, Taichi Kaminogoya has released an iPhone Template Set for MT, that gives you the basics and a good jumping off point for something more sophisticated and customized.
Six Apart and JumpBox have announced the release of Virtual Movable Type. Six Apart writes “the virtual appliance automatically installs Movable Type and all necessary infrastructure on a single virtual machine, thus eliminating the complex task of configuring server applications.” Jesse Gardner of PlasticMind weighs in here as does WebMonkey here and InfoWorld.
Back in early August, Yahoo announced that their formerly experimental geolocation platform FireEagle was now officially opening up to all users. In the announcement it was noted that MT “will get automatic location reporting for its authors and in its Action Stream service.” Sounds interesting and I look forward to seeing what becomes of that collaboration.
Six Apart’s David Recordon announced on the mtos-dev mailing list that the OpenID 2 branch that that has been under development has been merged in the MTOS core trunk now. You can count on those features showing up in the next major release of MT.
Six Apart engineer Beau Smith ported the Sandbox semantic template set framework for MT. Beau has also been hard at work on Vanilla that “provides various template sets which only contain the code necessary to show a specific feature in Movable Type. These template sets are not intended to be used for publishing your blog, but rather to be used for learning how to add a particular feature.” Learning about MT’s default templates and features? Start with Vanilla and start working your way through the ever improving documentation.
Speaking of template sets, Six Apart’s Jim Ramsey released the elegant Mid Century template set for MT. I love it and it has lots of potential for being tweaked and customized for your own uses. (My gold standard for any template set.) Anil Dash has already done so on his personal blog.
Last, but not least Arvind is back to writing his Movable Type Monday articles for the Blog Herald — well at least for a couple of weeks he was. College students. What can you do. The last two releases are here and here. Arvind’s articles are always essential reading (when he’s not cramming for an exam or traveling) for keeping up on the great work the MT community is doing.
Lots of good stuff and more to come.
We now return to our regular blog programming.
]]>Both of my presentations where geared towards advocacy of MTOS and my latest project Bezos, an effort to create an integrated library for working with the Amazon Web Services cloud and eventually a command line tools.
PDF copies of both including the example code I showed are below.
BTW: For those in attendance or if the video that as was shot during my Amazon presentation makes it into circulation, I reset my security keys. I used the S3 Browser to show how some of the scripts had worked and that app has the annoying trait of displaying all of your account information on startup. I knew that, but did it anyway knowing I could just reset my key.
]]>I’ve been following Andy Lester’s Perl Buzz blog since it launch and applaud his efforts to bring “fresh blood” to the Perl community. Like Lester I believe the Perl community has a lot to offer and by no means is a dying or irrelevant language. What I believe it does suffer from is what I will call a marketing problem. Some of it is “visibility” as Lester refers to it, but more of it is packaging, perception and presentation.
This thought has stuck with me for years, but it wasn’t until I read Lester’s Perl must decentralize, diversify and colonize post that I that I felt it was time to write about it here.
If you haven’t read the post I’m referring to or follow Perl Buzz I suggest you do.
So let me state upfront again that, for the most part, I agree with most of what Lester wrote.
I said for the most part though. Where I differ is in why other languages, PHP and Ruby (with Rails), are more en vogue. To me these are important points that are getting missed and overlooked by the Perl community that has lead to this condition.
These points are most apparent by comments made in the lead up to his three objects — decentralize, diversify, and colonize.
I’m certain that PHP has become a de facto choice for basic web apps because it’s just How You Do It these days. You see enough PHP in the context of the web, it starts to sink in.
This is generally true, but this view overlooks how PHP came to such a place of prominence in the web applications ecosystem. I don’t think PHP is a better then Perl in any means, in fact I thinks it’s pretty crappy stuff that I’ve never liked working with. Still PHP succeeded because it was just good enough and made running web application easier then anything else for most people.
PHP was free unlike Application Server Pages (ASP) or ColdFusion and was easier for hosting providers to offer and maintain then alternatives such as mod_perl or the resurgent FastCGI. It’s popularity was further enhanced as a default module of Apache making it’s availability through cheap shared hosting nearly ubiquitous.
Of course Perl and CGI for that matter is equally as ubiquitous, but they were and still are perceived as a less attractive option to many because it is harder to get something up and running. FTP a text file with a mix of HTML and PHP script and a .php extension and presto! it runs. Unless severely abused, PHP is more responsive because its engine is typically persistent thereby avoiding the performance tax any language running through CGI must pay. PHP does require a server restart like FastCGI or mod_perl to pickup changes either. Further, numerous vital (and then some) libraries come built-in and are then easily accessed where others languages like Perl leave that to the user assuming they have the rights to do so. The hosting provider could, and indeed some good ones will install a lot more then just the core distribution, but knowledgeable Perl hosts seem to be few and far between these days.
As an active member of the Movable Type community I’ve seen the difficulties Perl/CGI issues have caused users and impacted interest in Perl with a broader less adept user base.
Why is Ruby on Rails so popular? Is it better than Perl on Catalyst? Or is it just that people hear about Rails more? I suspect the latter, because perception is reality. When people perceive Perl as being dead, or not as powerful as other tools, it might as well be.
I whole-heartedly agree with Lester’s observation that perception is reality. Like his observation about PHP I think it misses an important point though.
Rails, in which Ruby would still be nowhere, made it easier for more professional developers to write applications with great user experiences quickly and easily. The genius of Rails is in its marketing.
I remember when I first heard David Heinemeier Hansson present on Rails how intrigued and even excited I was with how productive a developer could be. What really made Rails work so well in this context was that it was “opinionated software” that said “flexibility is overrated.”
This is of course heresy to the Perl community, but I think that perhaps the Perl community’s treasured there-is-more-than-one-way-to-do-it ethos needs to be broadened to include that sometimes one (highly preferred) way of doing things as an acceptable option.
This is why I was disappointed when I read about Catalyst. This is not to say that I think Catalyst is bad or not capable. It’s that it missed the most important advantage of Rails and why it was so successful in attracting a large fanatical community of developers so quickly. Catalyst wasn’t what I wanted.
I think there is a large group of users that don’t care about choice, but getting their job done as quickly and easily as possible. Business managers, entrepreneurs, investors, and the technologists working for them don’t care if a web application is written in Ruby or Perl or PHP or Java. What they do care about is providing a great user experience that will attract and delight users, grow a company, and provide the best return on their investment in time and effort.
Rails made that possible by having an opinion on its conventions (over configuration), JavaScript/AJAX libraries and so on that allowed it to create tool and libraries which helped developers write less software.
This is why so many of the most popular sites and web applications to launch are written using Rails, not just because people hear about it more.
PHP and Ruby on Rails lowered the barriers to entry and have reaped the benefits. Capable and powerful as it is, Perl has not.
I’m not sure precisely what moves the Perl community has to make, but I’m certain that without more (a lot more) attention to perception and marketing of Perl interest will wane. No amount of language theory or lightning talks or state of the onion will stop that.
I do hope that the Perl community does decentralize, diversify and colonize and that a big part of that work includes making it easier for developers to use and deploy Perl applications.
]]>Feeds is a topic near and dear to my heart that I have a long history with. Seems we as a whole have never gotten over all FUD and misinformation of the “syndication wars” that some clarity is needed. Here is the most important takeaway from this post:
There is no longer any practical reason to have multiple feed formats of the same information.
It seems this issue comes up every so often.
Any feed reader or software the consumes feeds worth anything can handle both RSS or Atom feeds. Every modern programming language I know of also have libraries from processing both. Not all take advantage of the more specialized and esoteric features of either — some do, but for most uses either if fine.
Choosing one or the other isn’t choosing sides. It’s a matter of usability and practicality. Having the same feed information in multiple formats forces a user to make a choice that they probably don’t understand and one that is ultimately unnecessary. Dean Allen recently wrote about it and before that Nick Bradbury.
But why did Six Apart choose Atom instead of RSS? MT Product Manager, Byrne Reese posted:
This decision was never about standards politics or what format is better than the other, this release is about performance, and in this day and age, there is no need to publish feeds in multiple formats when they are supported equally[1].
We selected Atom because all things being equal, Atom is an Internet standard and RSS is not, and that is more closely aligned with MTOS’ stated project goals.
[1] Here Byrne asked a post to identify which tools do not support Atom.
It’s also worth mentioning that MT (and other Six Apart tools) are standardizing on the Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) for remote clients to interact with the system. AtomPub uses the same format. RSS does not have an equivalent web services API option. Besides that, there are numerous flaws in the design of RSS that can and often does confuse news readers. The RSS specification is frozen with these flaws; however, there are groups attempting to address them in other ways.
From a software architecture and engineering perspective, to me, it’s quite logical that Atom be used. Popularity, as some as cited, is irrelevant given the circumstances and does not make the tool better.
This decision will only effect new blogs created in MT 4.15 and future versions. It does not stop you from using and creating your own RSS feeds nor will it delete, remove or disable them from your current blog templates.
That said, if you are producing feeds in multiple formats, I recommend you pick one and redirect the traffic to the others to that one. Doing so will help improve performance as Byrne suggests in his reply, means one or more less files to generate when a new post in made.
Have a software product that can’t read Atom files? Post them in the comments.
]]>The conference is being held in Chicago June 16-18. The the schedule is here.
I haven’t been to YAPC before so it should be interesting. From what I understand this conference is for the most hardcore of Perl programmers. I have some big plans for what I want to present and will be praying to the gods of “free time” to find some.
]]>WordPress.COM and TypePad is a fair comparison because they are both hosted blogging systems. WordPress.ORG is the open source software that you can download and install on your servers. With the source code you can modify it to your heart’s desire and use plugins etc. So if you are referring to WordPress.ORG then Movable Type is a more relevant then TypePad.
While this confusion is easily cleared it is still lost on most people. The WordPresses share the same name, but in many, but not all, respects are different things.
This could have been easily avoided if WordPress.COM would have been named something else. After all, TypePad began as a fork of the MT code and still shares some parts today. Given the popularity of Movable Type then (and still now), Ben and Mena could have chosen to name that service Movable Type. I’m thankful they didn’t.
]]>Yesterday Six Apart announced the availability of a Facebook application (yes you read that correctly) called Blog It. The TypePad-powered service enables Facebook users to make posts in Facebook out to any number of blogging tools.
Here are a couple of links covering it:
Six Apart CEO Chris Alden wrote up a good summary on his blog here.
Of course, there are those who are less than impressed or dismiss it as irrelevant, but then again Six Apart acknowledged there are shortcomings that they will be addressing. After all, this is a 1.0 release
I think it’s still pretty slick though.
]]>Our man Arvind Satyanarayan has started authoring a weekly column for Blog Herald summarizing the weekly happenings in the MT community. His first two posts are already up:
New posts are to be published every Monday, hence “Movable Type Monday.”
Now if we could only get a feed dedicated to his posts.
BTW: When I say “our” I’m speaking as a member of the MT community. Arvind doesn’t work for The Appnel Group.
]]>Chief Evangelist Jeff Barr explains the issue the Amazon Web Services Blog:
If you have taken a close look at Amazon EC2, you know that the instances are ephemeral. The instances have anywhere from 160 GB to 1.7 TB of attached storage. The storage is there as long as the instance is running, but of course it disappears as soon as the instance is shut down. Applications with a need for persistent storage could store data in Amazon S3 or in Amazon SimpleDB, but they couldn’t readily access either one as if it was an actual file system.
For my experience and those of others, instances expectedly shutting down has been rare so far, the possibility of catastrophic proportions was real. If an instance were to unexpected shut down it would be the equivalent of a traditional server’s drive array catching on fire — the data would be lost forever unless you had a very good backup system in place.
This shortcoming was acceptable in that EC2 was created for computing power and not general usage hosting, but that’s not what a lot of people wanted to do — many wanted to run web apps with SQL databases and other things.
So the ability to hosts sites or applications or run a SQL database server using EC2 instances was possible the onus has been on everyone using an instance to run file and database backups or even (multiple) replicated database servers even if high availability wasn’t a requirement so data wouldn’t be lost in the event of a failure.
Later Barr continues:
…our forthcoming persistent storage feature will give you the ability to create reliable, persistent storage volumes for use with EC2. Once created, these volumes will be part of your account and will have a lifetime independent of any particular EC2 instance.
In addition to being able to create and then mount these volumes of persistent storage from any EC2 instance, Amazon will be releasing functionality that will take snapshots (backups) of volumes and store it in your S3 account.
I also assume that you can mount these persistent storage volumes from multiple EC2 instances.
This is addition is simply huge because it makes Amazon a viable hosting option for web applications by eliminating the biggest technical hurdles. With this shift from compute to more general purpose server resources, I think a seismic shift is certain for how web applications are developed and deployed and Amazon is poised to win big.
]]>There is indeed a great deal to gain by contributing, and while many people might sniff at the fact that at least some of it is PR (as Tim put it), it’s easy to forget that PR is a crucial ingredient in the glue that holds together a community. A person with a bad reputation as a fair player is less likely to be welcomed into any community; someone who has a track record of playing fairly — or at least attempting to play more fairly — will be welcomed and will be able to reap the benefits all the more enthusiastically. You tend to give more when you know you’ll get more in return.
He goes on:
What Tim means by open source not just being a license is reflected in all of this. Anyone can write and release something under an open source license — yes, even Microsoft — but that doesn’t mean they’ll be used, re-used, built on or well-respected. That takes time and engagement, and a sense that you need to give as good as you get.
There are times when I think I’m talking to myself in what I think. Perhaps I could be mistaken.
]]>