#movable type

My Findings on coComment and Movable Type 3.2 Integration

· 4 Comments
coComment

After 12-hours or so of usage and debug­ging my MT tem­plates to prop­er­ly inte­grate with coCom­ment, I final­ly got some­where to say the least. If you need to catchup to what this is all about, you may read my pre­vi­ous arti­cle on what coCom­ment can do.

Any­ways, I final­ly got around fix­ing my Indi­vid­ual Entry Archive tem­plate. I did the fol­low­ing:

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

coComment Helps Us Remember What We’ve Said

· 9 Comments

I was actu­al­ly think­ing of some­thing like this. I was going to make it my first RoR project but that might just be to ambi­tious. Any­ways, plain and sim­ple,

coCom­ment is the only ser­vice that allows you to enjoy the full poten­tial of blog com­ments on the web. Before coCom­ment, the blo­gos­phere was not a glob­al con­ver­sa­tion, but tons of frag­ment­ed, hard to fol­low, and untrack­able dis­cus­sions.

Using coCom­ment, you can now keep track of what you have been com­ment­ing on, dis­play your com­ments on your blog, and see what is new in the dis­cus­sions you are par­tic­i­pat­ing in (if oth­er users are also on coCom­ment).

One con (at the moment), is that “users can only track com­ments from blog posts that they have actu­al­ly com­ment­ed on, and only com­ments left by oth­er cocom­ment users are shown.“1 But this was a day or so ago. I have to check the new ver­sion out myself as I’ve just signed up a few moments ago.

Along with their news yes­ter­day about ver­sion 0.4c being released, the team also men­tioned the fact that there is now a Fire­fox exten­sion for coCom­ments. This addi­tion, for sure, will make things a bit eas­i­er than hav­ing to use a book­mar­let on the user’s com­put­er.

There might be one small gripe though. As I was tak­ing a look at coCom­men­t’s Blog Inte­gra­tion sec­tion which lists which browsers and blog/CM­S/site-plat­forms it sup­port­ed, I read that Mov­able Type blogs must have the fol­low­ing for­mat,

<title>blog name : article title</title> or
<title>blog name | article title</title>

Oth­er­wise, the com­ment (in coCom­ment) will show up as “(unti­tled)”.

So, see­ing that, there might be an issue of hav­ing every­one involved have a stan­dard way of tem­plat­ing their TITLE-tags. I, for one, see this as a big thing (so it ain’t “small” after all). If this is true, and has­n’t been addressed in it’s next iter­a­tion, coCom­ment is pret­ty much forc­ing every­one to do “this and that.” Then again, we’ll see how this plays out with Micro­for­mats. So if you are listening/reading this oh-Lords-of-coCom­ment, please do let us know. (Then again, I just signed up and haven’t got­ten to play around with coCom­ment that com­plete­ly yet.)

All in all, the ser­vice is prac­ti­cal and very use­ful for those that like to read and inter­act with dif­fer­ent blogs. It’s great for coCom­ment to have got­ten around and imple­ment­ed some­thing use­ful to the mil­lions that are very involved with interblog-inter­ac­tiv­i­ty. In it’s cur­rent state of ver­sion 0.4c, I just can’t wait to see the oth­er fea­tures it will have when it rolls out from “beta”. Pret­ty much, like all the oth­er “Web 2.0” appli­ca­tion-sites. =)

Con­tin­ue read­ing →

  1. Michael Arring­ton, coCom­ment vis­it to Sil­i­con Val­ley [↩]

Movable Type 3.2 Free from Beta

· 2 Comments

OK. So this might sound some­what geeky but oh-damn-well… this involves technology—a part of me. Any­ways, Six Apart’s Jay Allen announced last night that Mov­able Type 3.2 will be released on 8/25/05 in the AM. That was cool.

I mean, for those of you that have been fol­low­ing our blogs (Kel­ly, Juan, Ryan and I), you may notice the “Pow­ered by Mov­able Type…” text-link some­where. I have been using their great soft­ware since 2002. After all these years, through all the hack­ing and cus­tomiza­tion, if I have to do it over again and pick a blog­ging soft­ware… it still would have to be Mov­able Type.

Yah, it might sound bias (I know) but MT has proven itself (IMHO) after numer­ous ver­sions that it adapts to new and un-fore­castable changes in the Blo­gos­phere, and most impor­tant­ly on the WWW. “What changes?” You might say. Well, first of all, I have to give cred­it to Blog­ger for mak­ing me curi­ous enough to start and express my thoughts on most­ly about any­thing, as I was “bored as hell” one day dur­ing a pro­gram­ming class back in UCI. I remem­ber back in the days that I want­ed to do more stuff with my first-ever blogsite. I felt con­strict­ed to what I was offered, and just need a new solu­tion.

So after Yahoo!-ing (no Google yet in my vocab) and con­fer­ring with var­i­ous peo­ple on what stand-alone blog­ging soft­ware, a cou­ple of names came about. I remem­ber James using b2, so that made it on top of my list along with oth­er ones from hotscripts.com. But alas, after a lot of think­ing, test­ing and research­ing com­mu­ni­ty forums of the respec­tive blog­ware… I found Mov­able Type­’s to be the most active, inno­v­a­tive and solu­tion-dri­ven group of invidi­vid­u­als. This was the decid­ing fac­tor in mak­ing my leap-of-faith to switch from Blog­ger to a stand-alone blogware—thank god I made a good choice.

Mean­while, I can tell you a lot more of my his­to­ry with MT and how it affect­ed and helped my career in Tech­nol­o­gy but that can go on for­ev­er. I’ve seen it evolve from a strict blog­ware, to a CMS, to a pub­lish­ing-plat­form, …to who-knos-what with this new release. It has:

  • helped me share my day with friends and fam­i­ly (vice-ver­sa),
  • keep my design-skills stay cre­ative,
  • pushed me to increase my knowl­edge of new web-tech­nolo­gies (i.e. XHTML, CSS, etc.)
  • and… type faster, to say the least =)

So whats in it for you, I don’t know. Its real­ly an open-end­ed ques­tion that has no right or wrong answers. But I do know this, it proves that it is a “small world.” And every nano-sec­ond, new ideas are being thought of to get peo­ple to inter­act with each oth­er more. After all, we’re only six degrees apart.

PS. Thanks to 6A-fam and MT-dev com­mu­ni­ty for their great hard­work in pro­duc­ing anoth­er prod­uct (that I feel) will have an immense effect on the inter­net and how peo­ple inter­act with each oth­er.

PPS. Thanks to 6A-fam for pro­vid­ing us who beta-test­ed 3.2 with this badge haha =)

I beta tested Movable Type 3.2