Sixapart went all out with their mixer. Open bar with great drinks (Chimay, sake, wine), tasty (but a little strange) hor d'oevres, great schwag, and an art gallery to top it off (with a slightly disturbing painting of a topless Uhura). There was also a lot of the MovableType team and random industry and blogger representatives, and you could generally tell who was who, as the MT people and industry people mingled while the pure bloggers stood around :). I managed to pull away from my wallflowering long enough to have a couple of conversations, including one with a guy from rojo, a soon-to-be combined XML aggregation/social network service.
The 3.1 demo went well. I wasn't excited by the PHP integration when I first heard about it -- I was worried that it wouldn't be a seamless switch -- but when I saw it in action I was impressed. With a simple menu selection you can get rid of page rebuilding, allowing you to make quick changes to your templates and speeding up the commenting process. The URLs stay the same and all the MT tags have been reimplemented using PHP. Kudos to Brad Choate for handing over the keys to this. They also showed off a new Post Status option labeled "future", which allows you to delay a post. That might be useful, but I don't know yet.
I've been having some good schwag karma. At Comic-Con I got the Star Wars lego minis and Incredibles poster. Google gave me a nalgene bottle and t-shirt. Sixapart wins the prize though. They gave everyone 32MB flash drives (USB 2.0) with the MovableType 3.1 beta loaded on it. They were even nice enough to give me an extra one so that bp can have one.
I didn't take too many photos as I've figured that their were so many bloggers there that there should be no lack of media produced from this event. Mena was taking tons of photos with Barak's Canon digital SLR, so I was jealous, as I want to save up some money for that camera. I did have to crop the photo of me and Mena to remove my mug from it, as there was no reason to ruin a perfectly good photo.
Mixer Photo Gallery (18 photos)
Comments (5)
Green with envy you got to go. Just wish I lived in the area and could have attended.
Congrats on the swag too!
Posted by mashby
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August 13, 2004 12:12 AM
Posted on August 13, 2004 00:12
Future posting would be really useful for periodic publishing of content, like putting up a new webcomic every day where you could draw a bunch and then set them to go up once a day, or putting together something like Pepys Diary where you could scan in all the entries and then automate the site posting.
Posted by David Ely
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August 13, 2004 7:01 AM
Posted on August 13, 2004 07:01
mashby:
If you can make it up to NYC in Sept I hear that the Creative Commons are throwing a concert up there :). I can't make it to that one, though a friend is hooking me up with CC t-shirts.
dave:
I was also thinking that the 'future' setting could help with pacing. I tend to post a lot of entries, especially photo entries, at the same time, and the future setting could space these entries out so that people reading my site weren't deluged all at once. Not nearly as useful as the examples you cite, but so far its the only use I can think of for this site. I imagine it could also be useful for corporate customers who wish to use their company blog to make announcements.
Posted by kwc
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August 13, 2004 8:12 AM
Posted on August 13, 2004 08:12
Nifty. Still wish I could've made it.... my schmoozing skills aren't that great, but it sounds like a lot of fun. Thanks for letting me be the luck recipient of the excess.
How many would you say were in attendance?
Posted by bp
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August 13, 2004 10:38 AM
Posted on August 13, 2004 10:38
You can try and judge from the later photos in the album. My best guess is between 50-100, on the lower end of the spectrum.
Posted by kwc
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August 13, 2004 10:56 AM
Posted on August 13, 2004 10:56