TypeKey Pushing TypePad

(originally posted at crw.typepad.com)

Last month on ninjafish I mused about comment tracking. Through chats on #joiito, #suwcharman and IM, a number of people identified the need for an easy and transparent way for users to keep track of the comments they leave scattered throughout the blogosphere. This lead to pie-in-the-sky fantasies about everyone having a web space of their own and the current practice of commenting giving way strictly to trackback pings.

Naturally, with all this talk of commenting, thoughts eventually turned to TypeKey - Six Apart's centralized identity service for comment authentication. It dawned on me that 6A had a golden opportunity with TypeKey: they could use TypeKey to drive TypePad sales if they educated their users on the difference between comments and trackbacks.

If you go to the TypeKey site, however, you'll find no mention of other 6A products at all. I believe this to be because 6A would like to see mass-adoption of TypeKey across other blogging platforms to maximize its usefulness. Turning TypeKey into an advertisement for TypePad would be counterproductive to this goal.

Potentially Working for Six Apart

(originally posted at crw.typepad.com)

I've applied for the Software Engineer position at Six Apart.

This comes after two long months of stumping for a job in the defense industry in the DC area.  There, I was wooed by the promise of steady work at decent wages, with no chance of having my position outsourced.  The trade-off would be the potential of my work being immoral and possibly repetitive and boring (which I would consider immoral as well).  It quickly dawned on me that such work just wouldn't suit me.

Enter Six Apart.

While helping AKMA with an oddly-borked MT upgrade, I serendipitously found the job opening at 6A.  MT was the first blogging app I ran on my own hosted server, and I'd spent a good chunk of time testing it during the version 3 alpha and beta phases and playing with the new plugin architecture.  It's a good codebase surrounded by a great community - who wouldn't jump at the opportunity to get paid to hack on it?

I applied and soon found myself in contact with Ben Trott.  Ben and Mena have a reputation in the blogosphere as being a ridiculously cute couple and as such I find myself tempted to give in to a false sense of informality when chatting with or about them.  It's quite disconcerting and will probably only disappear once I actually get to know them.

After initial contact, Suw was kind enough to hook me up with a 90 day free trial for TypePad.  Luckily she was able to attach the TypePad account to my pre-existing TypeKey account - which at first glance seemed an entirely non-obvious process.  TypePad auto-imported my profile data from TypeKey and I was off - ready to explore!