majordojo

Recent Entries in Open Source

• Now powered by Melody

  I am partially ashamed it has taken me this long to upgrade my own blog to run Melody given how much of my own time I spend hacking on it. The day though, has finally come, and I am pleased...

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  License vs. Copyright

  In a follow up post to my attempt at explaining the GPL, it has become clear that there is one more very important thing that can still trip users up in trying to understand the GPL; and that is the...

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  The GPL: what it means and what is means for plugins

  A friend of mine recently expressed their confusion over the GPL and how it all relates to the recent bruhaha happening in WordPress land. A quick search on Google will reveal a number of people attempting to answer the same...

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  Rethinking how plugins are installed and managed in Movable Type

  To my Movable Type fans and followers, I apologize for not posting here more frequently about Movable Type. You will find that I have moved a lot of my Movable Type blogging to two places: Endevver's Blog - where I...

• Great news for Perl: mod_perlite lives!

  This weekend I was pleasantly surprised by an email from Aaron Stone, the lead engineer of modperlite -- a project the two of us had started while we were both at Six Apart focused on addressing ways to dramatically improve...

• Media Manager users: thank Amazon.

  I have a love/hate relationship with Amazon right now as they recently made changes to their Amazon Product Advertising API that has broken Media Manager. Now I have numerous users tapping their feet anxiously waiting for an update, during a...

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  Still Making Things

  As my life has been slowly re-attaining equilibrium after having a second child, I have still somehow managed to find time to make things. Thank god, because making things keeps me sane when life wants to dog pile my schedule,...

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  Meet Melody

  People who know me, know that I love Movable Type. In fact I have devoted much of the last five years to the product and its community. Therefore it gives me great pride and much relief to be a part...

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  Teaser: Hybrid News Theme for Movable Type

  The most common request from people contacting me is for a redesign for their web site. While I am happy to work with them to completely redesign their website and engineering one exclusively for them, but rarely do people have...

• An upgrade to the jQuery Thickbox Plugin

  I have been doing a lot of work in jQuery as of late and stumbled across the popular jQuery plugin called "Thickbox" which works similarly to Lightbox, but is more fully featured. ThickBox is a webpage UI dialog widget written...

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  An Open Source Movable Type Operations Manual

  The Movable Type Jumpbox is a great solution for many people who want to get started quickly using Movable Type or who don't have time to build a system themselves. For tweakers like myself however, this is not sufficient. I...

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  A Photo Gallery Theme for Movable Type that works.

  I am the maintainer of the Photo Gallery plugin for Movable Type. It originally started with me creating a plugin to simply automate the installation of Doug Bowman's amazing photo gallery templates for Movable Type and slowly evolved from there....

• jQuery Dialog Theme for Movable Type

  Since leaving Six Apart I have been having fun working on a number of projects I just never could find the time for while working there. Of course, I am even more privileged to be working with iThemes who have...

• One of five features Perl 5 needs right now: mod_perlite

  A recent article written by chromatic in which he identifies mod_perlite as of the top 5 features Perl 5 needs right now has motivated me to try and the fire lit under those interested in this project again. I have...

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  Making a Better PHP Library for Google Checkout

  Long before Google had produced their own PHP example code for Google Checkout, I had the need to create my own. It was a library based upon the idea of keeping e-commerce online simple. My goal was to make it...

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  Introducing Publish Queue Manager for Movable Type

  An essential component of any large scale Movable Type installation is "Publish Queue." Publish Queue is a system by which files published by Movable Type are published in the background at the next available moment, as opposed to slowing down...

• "As long as themes are selling, why make them free?"

  The Revolution Theme will begin to transcend the blogging platform it was originally designed for, and Brian as a designer will gain greater visibility in a market he has yet to tap. In a post on wordpress wank, one of...

• The Evolution of Open

  I couldn't help but feel that in some respects, focusing solely upon open source would be a disservice to the audience. Last weekend I attended Blog World Expo in Las Vegas to give a talk on "Open Source." The talk...

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  Introducing Super Page for Movable Type

  Following the release of Movable Type 4.2 I wanted to take some time to focus some concerted energy upon an area of Movable Type that needed a great deal of love: documentation. In about a week I had managed to...

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  Introducing Yahoo! OpenID for Movable Type

  Today I am happy to announce the availability of the first Movable Type plugin to make use of Movable Type 4.2's built in support for OpenID 2.0. The Yahoo! OpenID plugin for Movable Type allows users to provide Yahoo! users...

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  @Make: Introducing AutoLink for Movable Type 4

  Make is brand I adore because it teaches us in its many ways that the best way to understand something is to take it apart, and in some cases to build something else in its place. As a hacker,...

• PHP Paginator 1.01

  I just released PHP Paginator 1.01. PHP Paginator was born out of the frustration of having to reinvent the wheel too many times to do something as simple as creating the next and previous links at the bottom of a...

• Automagic URL redirection and SEO maximization in Movable Type

  Clean Sweep now allows me to change my URL structure without worrying about how Google might penalize me. Clean Sweep is a plugin I released in conjunction with Movable Type 4.0 to help users keep URLs and permalinks valid on...

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  Creating plugins in Movable Type, with NO PERL REQUIRED

  Not to long ago I began work on a very cool new theme, or Template Set, for Movable Type. I had built out all the templates and nearly completed all of my work without having to write a single line...

• Keeping a watch over customers using Twitter, and what it really means to be "open"

  Not too long ago I stumbled upon a user who was having problems with Movable Type who I later helped by working directly with his hosting provider. A couple days later he asked if I would like to do an...

• Podcasting for Movable Type just got better

  Podcasting support for Movable Type just got better. In this most recent release of the Podcasting plugin for Movable Type, iTunes support has been rounded making it easier than ever before to get your podcast listed and listed properly within...

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  Clean Sweep Updates

  A while ago I switched from Apache to Lighttpd and in the process I broke my very own plugin installed locally here on majordojo: Clean Sweep. Clean Sweep is a plugin designed to help put an end to 404's...

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  Movable Type is whatever you want it to be

  What has always drawn me to Movable Type is its flexibility. Most of the time we, that is Six Apart: my employer and creator of Movable Type, talk and think about MT's flexibility in terms of the web sites it...

• Implementing Ping Back for Movable Type

  Years ago Ben Trott introduced one of the first seminal technologies and protocols that would shape the very nature of blogging and our industry today. Subsequently, WordPress released an alternate Link Back protocol, the umbrella term to refer to all...

• mod_perlite working!

  I have had a theory for a long time that perl based CGI scripts could be sped up considerably by simply by keeping the interpreter resident in memory. Not only that, but the module that makes that possible wouldn't be...

• How to Fix CGI

  Over the many years of their coexistence, the terms CGI and Perl have become virtually synonymous. This perception that CGI and Perl are one and the same has contributed to some small degree to the perception that Perl is outdated...

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  YouTube and Flickr support comes to Media Manager

  In yesterday's hackathon I took another whack at Media Manager 2.0 adding support for two of the web's most popular media sharing services, Flickr and YouTube. I have yet to update the documentation for these new services, so here are...

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  Demonstration of Amazon and Movable Type Integration

  Media Manager is still in beta for Movable Type 4.0, but it is still relatively stable and in use by a number of different users across the web. To help demonstrate how seamlessly Movable Type can integrate with a third...

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  Introducing Media Manager 2.0 Beta 1

  Media Manager has been a hobby of mine ever since I first started working for SIx Apart; from my first release of BookQueueToo, which was an expanded version of BookQueue, to a nearly completely rewritten Media Manager for Movable Type...

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  Introducing Clean Sweep for Movable Type 4

  When I upgraded this blog to Movable Type 4.0 I wanted more then anything to completely start fresh. To rethink my URL structure, the use of hyphens vs. underscores in my file names and so on and so forth, but...

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  Movable Type 4.0: The Ultimate Peace Maker

  Movable Type 4.0 is most developer-friendly release of the Movable Type platform to date. We have devoted countless hours creating some of the best developer documentation Six Apart has ever produced, and even harder trying to build into Movable Type...

• Where is Byrne blogging now?

  I typically wouldn't feel it necessary to post excuses as to why I am not blogging on majordojo, but what I have been consumed by for the last two months warrants some attention here, as it is near and dear...

• How to Dramatically Speed Up Your Web Application: An Introduction to memcached

  Six Apart often speaks of how its technology and contributions to open source help many of the most popular Internet applications scale to unprecedented levels. One of these tools is memcached, yet as important and ubiquitous as it is, it...

• Major Relaunch of Majordojo's Plugins

  It is with a great sigh of relief that I am finally able to announce a major relaunch of [almost] all of Majordojo's Movable Type Plugins. This relaunch is primarily focused on improving the resources and documentation of the plugins....

• Random thoughts on open source

  I open source most of the software I create on shear principle. But I don't open source everything. That is because a small part of me knows that a real potential exists for my decision to open source something may...

• Welcome to my dark corner

  I am always on the look out for interesting commentary about the company I work for, which is probably why I find myself drawn to The Blog Herald like a moth to the flame. I keep hoping that one day...

• Gravatar Plugin for Movable Type

  Gravatar is a userpic service that allows commenters to display avatars or userpics next to the comments they leave on a blog. The original Gravatar plugin for Movable Type was written by Tom Werner, the creator of Gravatar. But he...

• Less blogging, more programming

  Earlier this week I had the opportunity at the Movable Type Hackathon to dust off some of my "old" plugins and start working on them again. The plugin I chose to work on? Why Plugin Manager of course. It gives...

• Announcing "My PHP Google Checkout"

  I bet for many people looking to start an online store think of PayPal first. I remember when PayPal first debuted in 1998 when it fueled a renaissance in Internet commerce by enabling the long tail of retail - second...

• How to make a podcast

  Working at Six Apart I take for granted how connected (or unconnected for that matter) people in the world are. I work in an office which often gives me the feeling that I am living in some William Gibson novel...

• I will never implement a pagination control again. Period.

  Do you know how many times I have been working on an application that has to allow users to paginate through a list of something? 1,259,041. Give or take a few of course. Well, I finally had enough. There should...

• See the Tag Widget in action

  Arvind just sent me a link to an updated screencast of one of his many Movable Type plugins called MTProtect. In this plugin Arvind utilized a Javascript widget/control that I created a while ago, the screencast he created shows it...

• @OSCON

  This week I am attending Oreilly's Open Source Convention in Portland, Oregon. If you are interested in meeting up with me then feel free to contact me. Here are the numerous way to get a hold of me: AIM: byrnereese...

• Standardizing the Atom Thread Extension

  I have been an advocate for the Atom Feed Thread extension for quite sometime, and am an active developer of it. Within Six Apart I have helped deploy the extension across over 1 million Friendster blogs, I have developed my...

• Announcing Feed Manager for Movable Type

  In my work with the Atom Working Group, which I admit, has been scant recently, I have become really impressed with the number of Atom Extensions being defined and developed by the community - a testament to Atom’s extensibility. One...

• The Plugin of All Plugins

  I am the author of some relatively popular plugins for Movable Type, which is both a blessing and a curse. The “curse” comes from having to do the one thing most developers probably hate: support. And where do you think...

• Yahoo! Open! Sources! UI Widgets!

  Major kudos to not only the fact that Yahoo open sourced some of their UI widgets, but that they did so under the BSD license, allowing even more people to freely use these widgets in their applications. For example,...

• Open Source Business Models

  In my plethora of spare time <cough> <wheeze> I have been working on a project called "Test Run." Test Run is about to go into a public beta period which will require some way for me to support users reporting...

• Updated PHP and Perl Tools for Salesforce Developers

  Yesterday I had the pleasure to speak at Salesforce.com's user/developer conference: dreamForce. I spoke to update developers on the progress being made on SOAP::Lite, and on the updated Sourceforge modules I maintain for sForce developers. Several people came up...

• Props to my friends Matt and Dan

  I always feel so proud when I manage to get a story posted to slashdot. I really wish I had a merit badge of some kind, with an array of /.'s indicating how many stories I have gotten accepted... But...

• City Of Austin Migrating To OpenOffice.org

  An anonymous reader on slashdot wrote "NewsForge.com has a story up this morning about the City of Austin and the results of their pilot program on OpenOffice.org. The bottom line is this: they have found that more than 80% of...