Technology

Six Apart are wondering just what the hell people have been doing with MovableType in an effort to help streamline their licensing.

The definition of exactly what constitutes a weblog is actually more confusing since Six Apart clarified it.

Currently MT is used for two sections of the site in separate directories using two weblogs. Whether this counts as one or two weblogs under the new definition is anyone’s guess. There are currently three active users, with vague plans to add more.

If MT3 has features that are suitable, more sections of the site will be integrated into MovableType which will be another five weblogs, give or take, which moves the site beyond the base licence. Maybe. Depending on semantics. And features of course. It’s all a bit confusing at the moment.

Still, I’d like to know exactly what shiny things are planned to be integrated into the general release.

MT-Blacklist, which I can’t live without, is in Jay Allen’s capable hands. He started a wishlist for the new version today.

Most of the plugins used are neat little tools that format things the way I want. However, two of the things I’ve been holding off installing are sub-categories (installed David Rayner’s plugin, it crashed and burned in spectacular fashion) and threaded comments (luscious install of Alexei Kosut’s plugin on Phil Ringnalda‘s site).

It has been hinted that these two things could be in the new version, rather than as separate plugins, but I’ve been holding off to avoid the nightmare of porting major wackiness between versions or dealing with changes from a plugin version to an integrated version. So it would nice to have an idea of when the general release is due and what additional features are planned.

Netspace, a Melbourne ISP, has joined the list of ISPs planning to build broadband infrastructure to reduce their dependence on Telstra’s ADSL network

Spammers are now trying to find out which antispammers have infiltrated their ranks and are sharing sensitive info with fellow antispammers. Online spammer forums like the Pro Bulk Club, the Bulk Club and bulkmails.org have been gatecrashed by activists from organisations like Spamhaus. Steve Linford of Spamhaus said spammers know this already but they don’t know who amongst their number is working for the other side

A new web browser from Opera this week is the first major browser to incorporate RSS, an emerging technology that automatically delivers new blog entries and news articles

Wondering what to do with your disposable camera when you’re finished with it? TechTV has an article describing how to reach out and zap someone with a home-made stun gun

Web portal Yahoo will begin offering virtually unlimited storage for its paid e-mail customers and will upgrade free users to 100MB. The upgrade is part of an overall enhancement for Yahoo Mail that will launch this summer. Besides additional storage, the service will get a face-lift and tie in more Yahoo-branded services, such as Photos and Messenger

Yahoo and Google disable links to controversial adware maker WhenU after the company is accused of engaging in unauthorised practices aimed at boosting its search rankings. The practices came to light following an investigation by antispyware crusader Ben Edelman, a Harvard student who found that the company used a technique known as cloaking to dupe search engines into favourably listing decoy Web pages that direct people to other destinations, once they click on the link. Ben has a couple of follow up articles on the situation; Which SEO Did WhenU Use? The Best Inference: Synergy6 and WhenU Copies 26+ Articles from 20+ News Sites

Called Google Groups 2, the service lets people create, search and sift through e-mail mailing lists. People can also subscribe to and monitor groups of interest

For the next shot in the search engine advertising war Google has launched image ads in addition to their popular text AdSense program

Telstra yesterday made a last-minute settlement of a dispute with one of its major software providers on the steps of the Victorian Federal Court

You can now get a desktop application that alerts you to a big breaking news story, courtesy of the BBC. The BBC already offers news via e-mail, but the alert will pop up in front of other applications when something big happens with a nice little BBC News theme sound alert, so it should be faster than e-mail. You need to download a small piece of software to get it working. It was developed for the BBC by Skinkers Communications who also created a similar product for Britain’s Channel 4 and Sky News and for Disney. News International is thinking of using it here in Australia — via JournOz

This guy has been doing some serious modifications on his iMac, giving it a G5 style case but in white polystyrene plastic.

Be sure to check out the 2nd last photo of the mini G5 along side a G4 to get and idea of size.

Pretty slick indeed.

The new version of MovableType has been released to a less than enthusiastic response from current users — me included. Fair enough that they should be paid for their efforts, but they need to put some long hard thought into their pricing scheme.

The free version can’t be used on this site in its current form, so Six Apart’s commitment to a free version is going to be laughable to a large number of users. Even the paid versions are restricted to a set number of blogs and authors have already freaked out a sizeable portion of the community.

By adding these silly restriction to the commercial versions, they’re locking out small to medium companies who are looking for a CMS. Sure 20 authors may sound like a lot when you only have five employees, but considering the high staff turnover of some places I’ve worked, those author allocations will be used within the year.

Six Apart have termed the restrictions; Generous limits on weblogs and authors. Apparently they have a different definition of generous than I do. Why on earth they didn’t give the upper end versions unlimited blogs and authors is beyond me.

I also have my doubts about the new versions comment spam filtering abilities. So far it only appears to be working because the software has been in beta. Give it a month in the real world and it will be back to the usual flood of crap as the spammers circumvent the security. It doesn’t help that the new version doesn’t support the plugins that were developed for the previous versions. A serious oversight when you rely on MT-Blacklist to kill frequent comment spamming attacks.

And so far, the new features are nothing to write home about. In fact, they’re almost non-existent. Sure, better comment control is nice, but some functionality like the long promised sub-categories wouldn’t have gone astray either. There are no features that don’t already exist as hacks, work-arounds or plugins.

If you want people to part with cash for something they currently use gratis, then adding shiny things to entice their inner geek is a great way to do it. Six Apart seem to have forgotten this.

Feòrag has already mentioned migrating the Pagan Prattle over to WordPress when the Prattle gets a shiny new server.

WordPress only seems to have one drawback — it’s a PHP application — but it would give me the excuse to dabble with a new toy. It has some nice features, like the afore-mentioned sub-categories.

Scriptygoddess also mentions the lack of features and suggests Drupal as another MovableType alternative.

I can’t see the site moving to MT 3.0 any time soon under the current ridiculous licensing system. If I need to upgrade, well, WordPress is looking pretty good.

However, due to the nature of MT-Blacklist — it replaces MT code, rather than working with it — its current incarnation, 1.63, will not work with the new version. It may even kill the database. Having done that once, I have no desire to do it again.

Jay Allen has hinted at an even more amazing version of MT-Blacklist to come, which means that I’ll probably hold off any changes of platform until MT3 leaves the developer version and goes into general release.

The recent launch of IBM’s Office application suite is part of a broader challenge to Microsoft’s entire .Net development framework. On Monday, IBM announced it was launching a Web-based software suite that would offer Microsoft Office-like applications. But unlike Microsoft’s Office, IBM’s Lotus Workplace software is designed to be used over the Internet and is accessible from systems running Windows, Mac, Linux, Unix as well as handheld devices

Fifteen years after his trial, a convicted drug dealer in New York state belatedly got a chance to clear his name — thanks in part to an Internet search. In the United States and abroad, judges are turning to search engines such as Google to check facts, to look up information about companies embroiled in litigation, and to challenge statistics presented by attorneys in court. Dozens of judges have penned opinions describing Google as a valuable — and sometimes crucial — source of knowledge

Researchers at the Queensland University of Technology have discovered an easily-exploited vulnerability which can be used to take down most 802.11 wireless networks. The flaw operates at lower network layers than most previously-discovered security flaws in 802.11 networking, and affect any network operating at the 2.4GHz frequency — which is the sole frequency used by the most popular wireless protocol, 802.11b