blogging: April 2008 Archives
Blogging company SixApart announced a major expansion earlier today. (They also quietly unveiled a new look for their main corporate site)
The company announced its acquisition of New York based Apperceptive who will form the core of their new services division. Apperceptive's team have not only worked on a lot of very high profile projects but have also developed quite a few extensions for Movable Type (I think I've a couple of them installed on this site!).
They've also announced a new advertising solution for both bloggers (publishers) and media buyers. As this is a new service I'd expect there'll be a delay before we start seeing it "in action".
Anil Dash's post on their main site covers their vision in some detail.
Earlier in the day Arvind posted an interview with Anil on the Blog Herald
The services side of the company will probably meet with a degree of criticism from some quarters, but it's not uncommon for software companies to handle a certain amount of this type of work inhouse.
Will this have a negative impact on the developers and consultants who work closely with SixApart?
Judging by reactions on the mailing lists probably not, though the company's detractors were vocal as usual.
What is interesting to see is the range of services that they are pushing. These range from basic installation and tweaking to a full migration and upgrade service.
While the $199 price tag may put off some people I can imagine that a lot of small businesses might be attracted. With the current rate of exchange it equates to a mere 125 euro for a blog "tune up".
They don't seem to be offering design services, which is a pity as I'd love to give this site an overhaul!
EDIT: Fixed a typo spotted by David Raynes' eagle eyes!
The company announced its acquisition of New York based Apperceptive who will form the core of their new services division. Apperceptive's team have not only worked on a lot of very high profile projects but have also developed quite a few extensions for Movable Type (I think I've a couple of them installed on this site!).
They've also announced a new advertising solution for both bloggers (publishers) and media buyers. As this is a new service I'd expect there'll be a delay before we start seeing it "in action".
Anil Dash's post on their main site covers their vision in some detail.
Earlier in the day Arvind posted an interview with Anil on the Blog Herald
The services side of the company will probably meet with a degree of criticism from some quarters, but it's not uncommon for software companies to handle a certain amount of this type of work inhouse.
Will this have a negative impact on the developers and consultants who work closely with SixApart?
Judging by reactions on the mailing lists probably not, though the company's detractors were vocal as usual.
What is interesting to see is the range of services that they are pushing. These range from basic installation and tweaking to a full migration and upgrade service.
While the $199 price tag may put off some people I can imagine that a lot of small businesses might be attracted. With the current rate of exchange it equates to a mere 125 euro for a blog "tune up".
They don't seem to be offering design services, which is a pity as I'd love to give this site an overhaul!
EDIT: Fixed a typo spotted by David Raynes' eagle eyes!
For the past couple of weeks I hadn't been getting any email notifications about pending comments on this blog, which is why some of them took so long to appear.
Since I tend to login to check for new comments every few hours and had also been hit pretty badly with comment and trackback spam, I didn't think too much about it.
I logged in just now and noticed more comments in the queue again, but no emails in my inbox.
So I decided to look into it a bit further and SSHed in to check logs.
Bizarrely they were completely empty. I restarted postfix and mail began to flow again.
I suspect that I broke the mail server slightly during an upgrade, but as it doesn't actually receive any mail I didn't notice.
So if you weren't getting any comment updates from here for the last while and suddenly got loads of them I apologise!
Since I tend to login to check for new comments every few hours and had also been hit pretty badly with comment and trackback spam, I didn't think too much about it.
I logged in just now and noticed more comments in the queue again, but no emails in my inbox.
So I decided to look into it a bit further and SSHed in to check logs.
Bizarrely they were completely empty. I restarted postfix and mail began to flow again.
I suspect that I broke the mail server slightly during an upgrade, but as it doesn't actually receive any mail I didn't notice.
So if you weren't getting any comment updates from here for the last while and suddenly got loads of them I apologise!
In order to preserve what little sanity I have left I've changed the way comments are handled on here slightly.
Since comment and trackback spammers seem to target old posts I've decided to automatically close comments on posts that are 6 months old or older.
The old posts that were attracting the odd comment were mainly to do with older versions of Ubuntu etc., so there's not much point in accepting new comments since the software has changed in the last couple of years.
The other reason why I'm doing this is because I made a boo boo the other day and turned up the spam checking a little too high. This meant that I may have blocked several legitimate comments and had to spend a couple of hours trawling through about 20k+ worth of spam comments to rescue them.
I'll update the comment policy of the site shortly to reflect the new "regime"
Since comment and trackback spammers seem to target old posts I've decided to automatically close comments on posts that are 6 months old or older.
The old posts that were attracting the odd comment were mainly to do with older versions of Ubuntu etc., so there's not much point in accepting new comments since the software has changed in the last couple of years.
The other reason why I'm doing this is because I made a boo boo the other day and turned up the spam checking a little too high. This meant that I may have blocked several legitimate comments and had to spend a couple of hours trawling through about 20k+ worth of spam comments to rescue them.
I'll update the comment policy of the site shortly to reflect the new "regime"
