Happy Monday, folks! Before I get into this week’s news, I wanted to mention a blog post written by Chris Alden, Chairman and CEO of Six Apart, a little over a week ago. In it, Chris discusses the effects a US recession will have on blogging. His theory is that a down economy will encourage people to “invest in themselves,” which will mean spending more time blogging.
Whether or not Chris is right remains to be seen, but if he is, it should affect more than just blogging. Most blog theme and plugin creators are independent developers. Investing in themselves means creating more designs and writing more code. If Chris’s theory holds we should see a lot of new blog tools in the coming months.
Speaking of which…
Plugins
Archive Uploader — ToI Planning released ArchiveUploader, which allows you to upload a zip, gzip, or tar archive of files to load into the Asset Manager. This is a great tool when you’ve got several pictures to upload to your blog.
Action Streams — We’ve got two Action Streams plugins this week. First, Yves Luther released Qik Action Streams for pulling your Qik movies into your action stream. The nice thing about this plugin is it pulls enough information to embed the video itself into your stream.
Also for Action Streams, Brendan O’Connor released a plugin for Get Satisfaction that shows new topics and replies. Thanks, Brendan!
EasyWorkflow — Ideal for sites with editors that approve posts before publishing, EasyWorkflow adds an “Unpublished (Review)” status for posts. When selected, an email will be sent to notify the editor that the post is ready.
Auto-Disemvoweller 2.0 — Thomas Hassan created this plugin for “disemvowelling” comments that are rude or vulgar. Whatever it takes to teach commenters to be civil, right?
MT-Notifier — Another week, another new version of MT-Notifier. In all seriousness, it’s great to see Chad Everett continuing to improve this excellent plugin.
Finally, Six Apart’s Anil Dash recently spoke at the Conversational Marketing Summit about business and social networking. You can watch his presentation online.
What have you done with Movable Type lately? Let us know in the comments.
