Brian Sweeting

Capitalizing on Movable Type’s new license pricing, pMachine is giving away 1000 free licenses for their Pro blogging tool, ExpressionEngine. They’ve already received more than a 1000 responses, but a drawing will be held for 250 additional licenses. Submissions are being accepted until midnight tonight (Sunday, May 16 Pacific Time).

Six Apart released MovableType 3.0 to the public this morning…along with some pretty restrictive new licensing.

I feel like this licensing model is far too restrictive. This is a pretty far step from something that in the past, has been free for personal use, and $150 for commercial use…and that is with no limitations on the number of blogs and authors you can have. If I’m a commercial user paying $700 for this thing, I want to be able to have as many authors and weblogs as I want. The real kicker about all of this is that MT 3.0 isn’t that big of an improvement over MT 2.66. I could see, (maybe) doing this, if this was some sort of landmark release, but not for the trivial improvements in 3.0.

With this news, I am going to start looking at different publishing systems such as Blogger, TextPattern, WordPress, or PMachine/ExpressionEngine.

Update

Six Apart has responsed to their users feedback. They have updated the licensing prices and some of the license conditions for Movable Type 3.0:

For the free version, you can have one author and three weblogs instead of one author and one weblog.

I think Six Apart should be commended for this. Obviously they are in business to make money, and I am not opposed to paying for good software, which Movable Type definitely is. I just felt like the initial licensing was a little too restrictive. Six Apart has done what every company should do, they listened to their users, and responded quickly. It can be a dangerous thing giving your users a voice (on your own website) but it proves that Six Apart cares about what its users think and that through their feedback, they can improve Six Apart and its products.

This website has taken a major turn. I decided that the “IT Weblog” moniker was a bit of a misnomer. It seems like I have been talking more about design, development, usability, and accessibility lately more than anything that’s really specific to Information Technology. I still plan on talking only about technology, the site will just be called simply “Sweeting.net”.

In addition to rebranding this website, I have also done a complete redesign. The last version was getting too busy. I wanted to return to some basics and focus more on usability and increasing interaction through comments. I’m not completely satisfied with this design, so I expect it to evolve a little more as time goes on.

Yesterday I proposed a meetup of SLC/Provo area web developers. My thinking may have been a little too narrow. I received an email from Dr. Harold Carr, a Utah-based developer for Sun Microsystems. He said…

"…I don’t do web development, but I do help build the infrastructure used by the web. I’d be interested in meeting to get a perspective on how the infrastructure is used and how it can be improved."

I’m sure there are others who, like Dr. Carr, might want to get together. So I would like propose having a Utah Tech Blogger Meetup. It might be a good way to put a face to the blog (so to speak). I’m thinking maybe getting together for lunch somewhere in either Salt Lake or Utah County. If you are interested, just leave a comment saying so. If there is enough interest, then we can think about a time and place.

Note
I will list here, those who contact me via email expressing interest in a meetup:

• Phil Windley
• Harold Carr

I’m not sure how long Apple has been doing this, but here is an iTunes Music Store RSS Generator. It would really be cool if the tool let you specify keywords.

After upgrading my Movable Type installation to 2.65, I added an Atom feed.

For more information, see the Atom wiki at http://www.intertwingly.net/wiki/pie/

A Microsoft employee got axed due to a post on his personal weblog. The post, “Even Microsoft Wants G5’s“, is about a shipment of PowerMac G5’s he took a photo of as they were being delivered to Microsoft’s campus. Seems harmless enough, but it was enough for MS to decide he is “no longer welcome on Microsoft’s campus.”

I was in a brainstorming meeting recently where the topic of corporate blogging came up. The idea was received with varying levels of enthusiasm. I’m sure some people in the meeting just thought that something like this would never fly with corporate communications. The communications and PR people take great care to ensure that every piece of information disseminated from the company is safely within the realms of what is legal and ethical, and that it reflects the company’s image in a good light. While I think all of that is important, there are some cases where I think corporate blogging can be beneficial.

The first case deals with perception. How is the company perceived by current and perspective customers, partners, and even competitors? It seems those who are involved with projecting the image of the company focus too much on “professionalism” and less on “personalism”. It gives the impression of a stuffy company and it makes you forget that there are actual “people” behind the scenes, who are passionate about what they do. I think that blogging can be an effective tool to let the public see what goes on behind the scenes and gives a human feel to things. An article in eWeek talks about Robert Scoble, a member of the Windows marketing team, and his blog. Scoble writes (unfiltered) his personal and professional views and he reports that it has been an extremely positive thing. Quoting from the article:

The article also mentions that even Steve Ballmer has given his given his blessing to Scoble’s blog. For another example of public corporate blogging, see this article about blogging within Macromedia.

The other case where corporate blogs can be beneficial, is for promoting more open and effective internal communication. I’m a believer in a company who values the thoughts and opinions of its employees. Blogging can be a very effective tool for collaboration and knowledge management. This is also a good safe way to begin blogging, because this type of blogging is done internally. It can have positive effects in areas such as team cohesiveness and project management. I have experienced this just from reading other people’s blogs. It gives you insight into what this person is really about. Even though I am not working in the same organization as they are, I still take interest in their current projects because I may be undertaking a similar project and can learn from their experiences. Check out this interview with Evan Williams, the creator of Blogger, and how blogging is being used internally at Google.

As time goes on and the world becomes more accustomed to this personal publishing platform, I think we are going to see blogs used in very creative ways that will benefit both individuals and the businesses they make up.

I’ve been using FeedDemon for about 2 months for managing my RSS subscriptions. It is a great product and has excellent features. But the problem I’ve had with it and other news readers, is that they don’t have “syncability”. I have a desktop and laptop, and I have FeedDemon installed on both. Now that I am working from home, I primarily use my desktop, and when traveling I use my laptop. So if I add new RSS feeds on one machine, I have to do the same on the other machine. Also, there is a difference between the two machines when it comes to the posts I’ve already read. To sum up, it makes me feel like I’m back to using a POP email acccount instead of IMAP.

Bloglines is a server-based RSS aggregator that is accessible through any web browser.

Bloglines features include:

• Two-pane interface for easy viewing
• Grouping of subscriptions in folders
• Expandable outline of subscriptions
• RSS auto discovery of feeds
• Support of all popular syndication formats
• Notification window tells you when blogs you’re subscribed to have been updated
• Bookmark function lets you bookmark entries
• You can also choose to share your subscriptions with others with a public url:
  http://www.bloglines.com/public/sweeting

Of course the feature-set isn’t as rich as a client-side news reader, it is still pretty new. So I’m expecting great things in the future.

I took a couple of days to update the look of my site. The last design was a little too boxy so I toned downed the boxiness a little. I also took the opportunity to move my static content so it is now controlled by Movable Type.

Some new features include:

• a “Recent Posts” list of the last 5 posts
• a php-powered style switcher that allows you to customize the text size and color scheme
• a menu that is a little cleaner and incorporates the links to my static content
• a new tutorial section where I have some server-side tutorials now, and in the future I plan to add some tutorials on various topics within web design and programming.

As for standards, the site is 100% valid XHTML / CSS. And now it is compliant with section 508 accessibility guidelines. The tabless layout doesn’t work in older browsers like Netscape 4.x, but I was careful to make it accessible to those older browsers.

I hope you like the new look.