Entries Tagged 'Six Apart' ↓

spurred on by my post yesterday, I have finally licenced the content of mikel.org under a Creative Commons Canada by-nc-sa license. It was really just inertia that kept me from doing it before, or at least since November 2004 when Canadian CC licences were first made available.

Wish list? Movable Type makes it easy to create a US license right in the site preferences. Frankly, though, I think it’s obnoxious that Six Apart has a US-centric feature embedded in their software when International versions do in fact exist. I also wish the Creative Commons Canada people had: a) made it easier to download the appropriate graphic and store it locally (with instructions for those who don’t know how); and, b) I wish they’d included size attributes in the image tag itself. Small details, but important ones.

Six Apart has bought LiveJournal. Here’s the Mena’s Corner about the whole thing. I’m impressed by how Six Apart seems to be developing as a company. From the licensing changes to this, they really seem to be learning.

this week as Six Apart has taken Series B Funding to the tune of $10M from August Capital.

Andre Torrez and Jason Kottke have unveiled DropCash, a neat little web application that uses Six Apart’s TypeKey and PayPal’s API to implement a donation system suitable for small fundraisers and such. If you haven’t been paying attention, this sort of thing is the next-gen web.

Mena Trott of Six Apart has asked a question of the community of Movable Type users: How are you using the tool?

My current setup is very simple, I have two authors - Nadia and myself - on three different MT-weblogs. There’s this main weblog, Nadia’s weblog, and another weblog called Words (which is drastically under-used at the moment). When I taught a class at McGill, I used my installation to do an entirely independent class website as well - one for each semester. Right now, I fit in under the personal license at US$70 (that’s over $100 to we Canadians), and I can live with that (barely). The full US$100 is out of the question, though - I find that very expensive. And when my class sites were up, I don’t know which terms I would have fallen under.

The other issue I worry about is in terms of other projects that I do from time to time. At the moment, for instance, I have been laying the groundwork for a personal project that would involve at least 6-12 authors in one website at another domain. It would be non-commercial (though it would be indistinguishable from a commercial site), but I don’t think I’d pay US$150 plus hosting fees (in addition to a LOT of my time) for such a project. And if I have to ask contributors (who would be doing it for fun) to pay me US$10 each for the privilege, well, it’s doubtful anyone would do that. As far as I am concerned, the current licensing terms make it difficult if not impossible to use MT for a hobbyist publishing initiative, like a small ‘zine or something like that.

TypeKey, from Six Apart, makers of Movable Type and TypePad. I’ve been starting to think that Flickr might have something to offer in this area as well. My personal view is that they should work together and figure out how to federate this in some way. It would go a long way to calming fears that will arise from those who don’t want to rely on a single, central server from a single company.