Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving to all our our US readers! We'll be relaxing with too much turkey pie our families after a super-busy time launching cool new stuff. But as you know, there's always more we're up to, so stay tuned.

via blog.ruhlman.com

A Thanksgiving Treat from Six Apart - TypePad Motion 1.1

At Six Apart we have a long history of developing leading class open source applications and supporting developers who contribute to the open source community. Our latest community microblogging application, TypePad Motion, has been extremely well received since its launch over a month ago. As these communities have grown around TypePad, so has their need for better community management and social integration. Our members have given great feedback on features and improvements they would like to see, and we've listened!

Today we are excited to release TypePad Motion 1.1, with all new moderation and syndication capabilities built right into the application - and that is on top of the awesome performance improvements. We strongly recommend all current TypePad Motion users to upgrade their application to the latest release.

New Features:

• Share with Facebook and Twitter: New posts on TypePad Motion community sites can be shared with your friends on Twitter and Facebook. If you  haven't already, add your account credentials to your "Elsewhere" accounts on your TypePad account page. Then click the check boxes for Facebook and Twitter under the compose window to share your post with your friends   
• Moderation: A moderation tool is now included with TypePad Motion. Administrators can select to review all posts before they are published, or enable selective moderation (by post type such as text, picture, audio, video or a combination thereof) and community policing.
• Flag a Post: Community members can now flag and identify inappropriate and offensive posts. This is a powerful mechanism to help keep our online communities free from spam, griefing and generally bad behavior.
• Performance Improvements: Taking advantage of the TypePad architecture, TypePad Motion now supports template and object caching, which means community sites are faster than ever, with improved page load and data access.
• Easy Upgrade. If you wish to take advantage of updates we make to Motion after you have installed it, you can use this command to bring your local installation up to date:

sudo easy_install -U typepad-motion

• Bug Fixes: We also fixed some minor issues on local profiles and registration.

Documentation:  Read the updated documentation to install and configure moderation, with additional  instructions for community managers using moderation tools.

Download: For our developer community and open source affictionados, here are links to the TypePad Motion download pages on Github, Pypi and our own TypePad Developer Resources.

Best. Gift. Ever.

My mom prints out some of my blog posts and emails to save, and for my dad to read. While that's adorable, it's doesn't hold a candle to how happy my folks would be if I made them a Blurb book from my blog, like Steve Garfield made his mom:

If you want to make someone special in your life happy this holiday season, why not make a book out of your blog with Blurb? It's easy, and they've got a special promo from now through November 24th for 20% off plus free shipping. Give the gift you know they'll love!

Talk about Motion. Learn how to Django

Last week, Andrew and Matt from Six Apart's New York office gave a talk about TypePad Motion to the Django-NYC group. They gave a demo of the application, explained the basic infrastructure of TypePad Motion, demonstrated the installation process and explained the details of Motion's internals, including BatchHTTP and RemoteObjects.

If you'd like to watch the talk, we've posted the full hour here. It's the perfect time to curl up with a hot chocolate, a box of Nilla Wafers and watch the whole episode after the jump.

Use mod_wsgi for large TypePad Motion sites

So you've tried out the new TypePad Motion and now you're ready to run a large public community site. That is great news and we're here to help you!

We just added a guide on using mod_wsgi to run production scale communities on a stable Web server environment. We hope this guide helps you run more public, stable Motion sites using mod_wsgi. If you have trouble or just want to share tips and tricks for running production Motion sites, feel free to share your thoughts with the Community.