I’m really psyched to release the first public beta of Twitster into the wild today.

But first, let me tell you a story.

I work a lot with the Movable Type community. It’s a small community, but there are some really talented developers and designers doing some really cool stuff. One day I sat back and realized that the community actually felt smaller than it was. The cool stuff that everyone was doing was happening in all different places, so it was hard to see the “bigger picture”—to get a finger on the pulse of the community.

Then I noticed that there was one common denominator for almost every community member: everyone was talking about their projects, questions and breakthroughs on Twitter. There was a greater conversation happening but no one was capturing it, no one was bringing these disparate pieces together to create something larger than the individual posts.

The obvious key was to track these conversations using hash tags. I checked out hashtag.org, but it doesn’t let you publish tagged tweets on your own site. The other problem was that if you follow a tag on hashtag.org, anyone can use a tag for any reason. If you’re following #mt you might get posts about Movable Type, Media Temple or Montana. I wanted the ability to pick a hash tag and then control who could contribute to my Twitter group.

You may also be thinking “Can’t this can be done with a Twitter app like TweetDeck or EventBox?” For the most part, yes. The problem is that those things aren’t being published on your site—they’re great for individual users to follow hash tags, but they make mass publication of these groups really difficult. I saw this first hand at SXSW ‘09 when presenters were running TweetDeck maximized on the big screen… not exactly ideal execution.

So I set out to build Twitster, an application that would let you publish the tweets of everyone you’re following on your own site and—perhaps more importantly—let you filter that feed for particular topics. I began work and built out much of the design and basic development, but I’m no codemonkey, so I asked my good friend Byrne Reese to help spearhead the technical development of Twitster.

And that’s what I’m happy to give you today: the first public beta of Twitster.

Here are some important links to help you get started with Twitster:

• Twitster Homepage
• Twitster Google Code Page
• Twitster Blog
• Twitster FAQS
• Report Issues
• Live Twitster Demo

Download Twitster v.1.0 beta 4

From the article:

We know how small babies need constant reassurance that they exist. My fear is that these technologies are infantilising the brain into the state of small children who are attracted by buzzing noises and bright lights, who have a small attention span and who live for the moment.

I often wonder whether real conversation in real time may eventually give way to these sanitised and easier screen dialogues, in much the same way as killing, skinning and butchering an animal to eat has been replaced by the convenience of packages of meat on the supermarket shelf.

Let me first say that I am not a scientist, a psychologist or even a social networking guru; but I am a father and a member of the human race, so addressing these concerns—whether real or imagined—is significant to me.

To help prospective Twitter followers make a more informed decision (and have some fun in the meantime), I put together a Nutritional Chart background image for my Twitter profile using info from TweetStats.

And since I love to share, here’s the PSD so you can roll your own (you’ll need Helvetica Neue for best results). Enjoy!

Download Twitter Nutrition Facts PSD

Necessity is the mother of invention, and with Ethan crying frequently, I needed a quick and easy way to switch between my headphones and desktop speakers. So I put together this simple AppleScript that toggles between two audio output sources and assigned it to a Quicksilver hotkey. Here it is in a nutshell.

I often find myself so busy using a tool that I don’t usually have time to talk about how I use it. This seems to be the case with many of the developers in the Movable Type community: lots of awesome things being done, not a lot of time left to share their creations and good ideas.

That got me thinking: how can we give people a clear and up-to-date picture of all the great things happening in the community without burdening community contributors with yet another tool to install or another social network to join?

The answer was simple: Use what they’re already saying. So I design and built (with massive help from Byrne Reese) HashMT to pull in existing conversations from all over Twitter, here in one place.

Here’s how it works: @hashmt follows anyone who is an active contributor to the Movable Type community and displays any tweet they’ve marked with #mt. This makes it easy to contribute since most are twittering already; now their existing conversation can be a part of this community “microblog” just by adding a hash tag to something they were already saying.

Don’t get confused: HashMT isn’t retweeting. Anything you read over by @hashmt is just news about the service. HashMT is simply aggregating specific tweets identified with a hash tag from specified users a particular account is following. You can then read those tweets over at HashMT or subscribe to them via the HashMT RSS feed.

There’s nothing like working on a project that comes in handy both in the kitchen and at the grocery store. What more can I say?

You can read more about the app’s launch in our portfolio or over at Elise’s announcement post on Simply Recipes.

We were also ecstatic to learn discover the Simply Recipes iPhone App was also featured as a staff pick on the front page of Apple’s app store just a day after its public launch.

Since I couldn’t attend the anniversary party, I figured I’d put together a little something for the good people over at Six Apart. This shirt’s been a long time coming:

Unfortunately, Printfection’s (and CafePress for that matter) base price is so high that even with the commission set to zero, the price is terrible. If anyone knows of a better t-shirt printing solution, I’m all ears. In the meantime: GO GET ONE.

Happy Anniversary, Six Apart. Represent!

Now, it’s no secret that I work primarily with Movable Type, but I’ve tried to make Plasticmind Design less about the tool and more about helping users succeed. I’ve worked with everything from Blogger to WordPress to Zen Cart in an effort to maximize user efficiency and experience (all tools fail in those areas at times). I’ve been critical of both platforms on my blog when their flaws justified it.

I saw this call as an opportunity to participate in the WordPress community, so I sent over this email:

I’d be very interested in designing the icons. I’ve done a lot of interface work with Movable Type and would love to branch out.

You can see my portfolio over at http://plasticmind.com/portfolio

Cheers! Jesse Gardner

The post made it clear that “to be taken seriously, you’ll need to show a background in icon design” and that “someone with experience (and possibly existing work they can leverage) is going to be the best candidate.” I’ve done fairly extensive icon work (having designed icons for several Movable Type plugins) so I thought it would be a good fit.

Earlier today I received this email:

Hi Jesse. Thanks for your interest, but the main goal of opening up the icon design to the community instead of just hiring someone was to give designers in the WordPress community a chance to contribute. From your blog it looks like you’re more of a Movable Type guy, which is cool (I was on MT for years myself), but would defeat the purpose. About a dozen hardcore WP users volunteered for the icon design, so we’ll most likely wind up using one of them.

Thanks for volunteering, though! Jane

Now, I’m not naive. I did realize when writing this email that getting chosen would be a stretch given the title of the post. I was just hoping that we could set our partisanship aside and focus on the issues (a better UI experience for WordPress users).

Update: I just got this email from Jane:

Hi Jesse. I was talking to Matt last night and pointed toward your post, and he agreed with your position. I think he’s also a pre-existing fan of your work. Anyway, if you’re still interested, you are welcome to participate.

The icon design project has basically been turned into a contest/competition. Since over a dozen professional icon designers from the WP community responded, rather than make a choice and put all our eggs in one basket, we decided to give everyone with a good portfolio a chance. About half a dozen designers were still interested after hearing the following plan.

Each designer is making two icons (posts and links) to show the style they would propose for their icon set. We’ll review them and give feedback to those that seem at least relatively on track, and will let anyone who’s super far off brand know that their icons aren’t really what we had in mind. The ones who move forward will create a full set, which we’ll then review. As long as the completed set still feels in brand, we’ll include it in the community vote for default icon set. The final decision rests with the lead developers, but the community vote will carry weight in that decision.

I’m actually really excited to be able to participate in this. It’s easy to start playing favorites based on platform, but it ultimately comes down helping more people get online, finding the right tool for their situation and making the current tools even better. That’s how we’re all going to succeed.

Ok, the first question that nearly everyone asks when they hear about Virtual Movable Type is: “What’s the virtual part all about?” From the readme file:

JumpBox virtual appliances are the easiest path to running server based applications. A JumpBox bundles the operating system with the application and all its dependencies into a single ready to run bundle. This allows you to focus on working with the application while not having to worry about getting it installed. It also means that the application can be deployed on any x86 platform regardless of what platform the application is written for. All that is required is the JumpBox, some virtualization software like VMware, anetwork that assigns dynamic IP addresses (most do), and a computer with enough RAM and disk space.

The long and short is that a pre-packaged version of Movable Type is bundled up and ready to run with any software that handles virtual appliances. Some servers support this natively which turns running MT into drag-and-drop simplicity. You can also use different desktop virtualization packages like Parallels or VMware (the VMware player is free). I’ll be talking about my experience with Virtual MT and Parallels in this article.

Installation? Virtually Painless.

Ok, that subtitle sucks, but the installation sure didn’t.

1. Download Virtual Movable Type from Jumpbox. You don’t even have to fill in any information to get at the file (which actually surprised me).

2. Unzip the downloaded file. If you’re running VMware, Parallels or some other virtualization software, Jumpbox.pvs should show up ready to run. One click and Parallels booted up my new Virtual Movable Type server.

3. Log into the local Jumpbox panel from your browser. Once Parallels boots up, it will show you two IP addresses, one for accessing Movable Type and one managing the Jumpbox virtual server that’s running. Log into Jumpbox and you’ll be able to set up your account as well as turn on features like SSH, SFTP and stats.

4. Log into Virtual Movable Type. One thing they don’t point on well enough in the docs is that your username is ‘admin’ and your password is your Jumpbox password. One you’re in, everything should look familiar. Now enjoy the new blog smell for a moment.

After seeing the nifty characters TwitterKeys made readily available for posting into your Twitter and IM conversations, I got inspired to dig around the 65,000+ Unicode characters and find some more gems.

As I did, I started to realize a couple of things. First, a huge list of symbols wouldn’t be all that helpful. Second, these symbols are useful for more than just jazzing up your Twitter conversations (✌ @plasticmind). So the idea of an organized character map tool that actually let you click a symbol to copy it to your clipboard began to percolate. Too often I’m opening up Word or trying to find a page on Google with the symbol I need.

The result is SymbolAssist, a browser-based character map that saves you time by letting you click-to-copy symbols to your clipboard.

1. You cannot create system level asset custom fields. This precludes sharing asset fields across larger blog networks where global templates are used.

2. There are no formatting options for editing Custom Fields. If you’re using Custom Fields for your primary entry data (i.e. no entry body, only custom field data), be aware that they have no formatting options for the editor—it’s just an input field. You can get around this with my PlasticField plugin, but it’s not the best solution because it requires you to create a new field, doesn’t use the default editor, and doesn’t support installed format types like Markdown or Textile.

3. You cannot sort by Custom Fields despite the note about the “sort_by” attribute (below the basename) on the Create Field screen.

4. Date-based Custom Fields don’t honor the format argument. They spit out one format alone making them virtually unusable for creating neat things like iCal files (which require UTC date formatting). And a related problem: You can no longer specify a time-only field or a date-only field in 4.2.

5. When cloning a blog, Custom Field data is lost (though this seems to be fixed for the next release).

Please feel free to let me know if I’ve missed anything.

In the previous article, I said that this article would be about the resources and processes of web design. What I hadn’t really considered was just how involved the process is, so I’ll just address the initial stages of the process in this article, specifically how to build trust with people and ultimately turn them into clients.

Keep in mind, my goal here isn’t to write the ten commandments of web design. My aim is to help those just getting started in the trade by sharing with you my experiences and hopefully turning up something valuable. I’m also attempting to keep this short and concise, highlighting tools and resources that I’ve found useful.

Cuil launched today with a plucky Drudge headline: CUIL TAKES ON GOOGLE “Cool,” thought I and gave it a go.

It is nothing short of terrible.

First off, the site has been ridiculously slow all morning which is terrible way to convery the whole “we’re-taking-on-Google” message. And please don’t use the “but we were featured on Drudge this morning” excuse—if you’re trying to oust the reigning search champion, you use some of the $30 million in venture capital to keep your site up, especially the day of the launch.

When their info page finally loaded, it was completely unstyled. At first, I thought they were going for the Google “anti-design” look; then I brought it up on my desktop machine and realized it was, in fact, styled. At least until I tried to get back there to grab some description text for this article and got a “Page Not Found” error. Perhaps it’s safer to link to the Wikipedia article…

Setting aside the issue of its cluttered layout and the fact that you have to teach people how to say the name, the results have been lousy as well, specifically the images it tries to “put in context”. If you search Google for “plasticmind”, I own the front page. A Cuil search for “plasticmind” turns up Gremlins, Brain Eaters, neon backpacks and a chubby white guy—not a single image that’s relevant. (Screenshot) What’s worse is that almost all of the results are either outdated or linked to non-existent pages: two duplicate results for my podcast directory which I moved last year; a link to my front page with last year’s header (I stopped using camel case on Plasticmind last year) and text from a news article I took down in 2006; a link to my audio directory which never actually got launched. In fact, the only text on the page that is up-to-date and relevant is the first listing, for my blog.

Doesn’t look like they’ll be “upsetting” Google anytime soon…

Unless you count watching The Secret City with Mark Kistler on Saturday mornings as a child, the only formal training I’ve had in graphic design is an Intro to Desktop Publishing class that taught me the keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop and Illustrator. Everything else I’ve learned through observation and synthesis. That’s one of the great things about the Internet: there is no dearth of brilliant people taking chances, making progress and sharing their findings.

Now, I wouldn’t consider myself brilliant, but I’d like to think I’ve made some progress over the last two years since Plasticmind Design first hatched. So in the spirit of giving back, I think it’s only right that I share some things I’ve picked up over the years.

Here are some of the tools that help me do what I do. This first article in the series covers inspiration, instruction and administrivia. Part two which I’ll publish next Tuesday will cover resources and process. (In the mean time, you can find some helpful design resources here.)

Decreased Clutter, Increased Productivity

When Six Apart launched Movable Type 4 last year with it’s brand new UI, I attempted to design my own user interface for it—partly to try out the new custom UI capabilities and partly because some folks were complaining that the new UI was script-heavy and slow. The Pep-o-mint UI (as I called it) I began last year was really little more than a makeover.

But something interesting happened that changed my perspective. After discovering that I could set up Movable Type as a dropdown on my desktop, I began blogging with more consistency and greater ease. The simplified iMT interface stripped away all the unnecessary clutter and reduced my blogging experience to three main options: New Entry, Manage Comments and Manage Entries.

Decreased Constraints, Decreased Productivity?

That led me to this conclusion: the more an application can do, the less specific its interface will likely become. Microsoft Access has very few constraints, which makes it very powerful but also very intimidating and difficult to learn. On the other hand, Twitter has thrived in large part because of its simplicity: 140 characters and an update button. Those limitations reduce the amount of mental processing that has to happen when using the application. Someone has limited the application’s focus beforehand (we call this design) and offers you a highly-specialized tool. You just decide if you need it (which is much easier since you can easily understand what it does).

A publishing system, however, is inevitably broad so it can accurately handle all types of published content. Almost all of the options available in MT4’s interface are useful to someone; they weren’t put there for no good reason. So the question becomes: how do we avoid this confusing and nondescript interface that sends average users screaming into the hills?

Handing Them The Right Tool

Focused interfaces. When someone wants to tighten a screw, don’t just hand them the toolbox; pick out the right size screwdriver and hand it to them. Today’s content management systems are ever-expanding toolboxes for websites, but most people usually just need a subset of the functionality not the whole thing. In fact, when we hand them the whole thing, show them every option available, they often end up spending more time sorting through the tools than actually using one.

I’ve come up with three different types of actions particularly for blogging systems: common actions, occasional actions and one-time actions.