The Major League Baseball season has begun and everyone at Apperceptive HQ has a smile on their face. Sure, a new beginning yields boundless optimism from our baseball fans, but it's the launch of MLBlogs that's making us happy.

For the last few seasons, fans have had the chance to create blogs branded with their favorite team's logo and colors, but the system was ready for an upgrade. Apperceptive couldn't pass up the opportunity to help. We moved the bloggers from Typepad to a brand new install of MT4 that is hosting hundreds of active blogs, created four new template sets for each of the 30 teams, built a slew of new plugins to allow instant access to existing MLB.com users (among other features) and paved the way for new features in the coming seasons. Best of all, it's free to anyone with an MLB.com account. Congrats to the MLBlogs team on a fabulous new community.

Posted by Matt Jacobs at 4:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The writers' strike just ended and shows are making their way back into development, but that hasn't kept AMC TV from unveiling a brand new look and home for their blogs. AMC's blogs spotlight their diverse programming. Some of the highlights since launch include a live chat with Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston right after the series finale, I am Legend's alternate ending, screenwriters' picks of which classics are in need of a rewrite, and there is going to be another Robocop sequel.

Apperceptive helped bring this together by building a set of custom templates and plugins on top of Movable Type's Community Solution. In addition to their blogs, the site features six forum areas for each of their focused genres and shows, lists of the most popular and recommended entries, and photo galleries (Steve Martin, Breaking Bad) to accompany the blog.

Posted by Matt Jacobs at 8:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Just two weeks ago, Six Apart announced the first stable release of Movable Type Open Source. We would have told you sooner, but we've been busy uncorking champagne and celebrating its arrival. Truth be told, we've been busy working on a whole slew of sites, but the office is definitely excited by this development.

Many of us on the Apperceptive team have been Movable Type users or developers for half a decade. By going open source, Six Apart is inviting the Apperceptives of the world to leverage their talents and make MT a better product. The community has already built hundreds of plugins and now we all have the chance to add the best features directly into the product. We had never lost our enthusiasm for Movable Type, but this opens up a whole new world of opportunity.

Congratulations to the Six Apart team!

Posted by Matt Jacobs at 7:38 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you follow political blogs, you're well acquainted with Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall's blog has been a staple of the political scene since the 2000 Presidential Elections. Early this month, we helped roll out a new design across TPM, upgraded the site to Movable Type 4 and added support for profiles and recommendations. The day after the launch, Josh was liveblogging Super Tuesday and opining the broadcast of MSNBC's debate coverage. Meanwhile, the site didn't miss a beat.

Since then, Marshall has received the prestigious Polk award, a first for a journalist who's primary readership comes through a blog. But they're not resting on their laurels.

Any one of TPM's features would be a noteworthy site to itself. The site was among the first to trace back the trail of the Spitzer investigation, they maintain the most up-to-date poll report on the web, the acclaimed TPM Muckracker acts as the prototype as the future of investigative journalism, and TPM's readers offer more than a hundred news and opinion posts every day in the TPM Café.

Posted by Matt Jacobs at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Democracy Now! is not just a radio show, it's a community media collaboration broadcasting cutting, progressive news and analysis in audio, video, and text to the world. And after two years in development, the redesigned Democracy Now! web site is up. As a long-time fan of the show, it was a pleasure to be able to contribute. Apperceptive designed the front-end for a hand-rolled content management system, blog, and store built with Ruby on Rails. The show is available in a variety of audio, video, and podcast formats, the pages are valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, the content is Creative Commons licensed, and the URLs are just beautiful.

Posted by John Emerson at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Since its inception, Serious Eats has been one of our favorite sites (of course, we're a little biased). But Serious Eats Mobile is our new personal favorite.

Apperceptive helped Serious Eats customize their Movable Type plugins, community solution, our own Sphinx plugin, and templates for the mobile view, as well as nodding supportively while they did fantastic work. We've used the recipes as a handheld source of inspiration for dinner, planned a holiday meal on the train, and gotten great restaurant reviews on the go. Serious Eats in your pocket - the future is a yummy place to live.

Posted by Ginevra Whalen at 11:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you thought that reading a magazine online was cheating, let Radar change your mind. Hourly updates, hilarious videos, eye-catching thumbnails and plethora of exclamation marks--all the more reason to stay online a little longer. With their newest addition of tags with each entry, you may find yourself wading in your favorite pool of Paris Hilton entries or soaking it all in at once on the scandal page. Determined to leave every single searcher satiated, its search box comprehensively finds entries containing any data containing the word or phrase of your choice. Last, but not least, is that burning feeling to respond to that question mark ending so many sassy titles. Comments and commenter profiles come to the rescue, no doubt contributing to the gossip content and reader staying power. Glossy pages and blogs: could there be a higher authority on news? Apperceptive is now happy to accept comments.

Posted by Natalie Podrazik at 10:54 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

ninemillion.org tells the stories of refugee children from Iraq, Chad, and Colombia. Apperceptive redesigned the site for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in time for its September 2007 relaunch at the Clinton Global Initiative summit. The goal of the campaign is raising $220 million by 2010 to allow 9 million refugee and vulnerable children to get an education. Though the stories are some of the hardest you'll find, we choose a bright but sober palette to project a measure of youth, hope, and dignity.

The site also features a special appearance by UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Angelina Jolie.

Posted by John Emerson at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In November, Apperceptive gave an extreme makeover to Fashionista.com deploying a new look and a new community forum and upgrading the site to Movable Type 4.

The design comps, implemented by our friends at Concentric, were built to invite people to browse the archives and to comment.

We love a blog with attitude and style, and those hand-made trivia collages really shine.

Posted by David Jacobs at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Over the past few years, Just Seeds had been through a few incarnations, growing from a single artist's website into a full-blown artists' cooperative. The artists envisioned their site as a platform for not only making their work available to the public but also for discussing the political, social and cultural implications of their work. They also knew that they wanted a single, easy solution to maintain both the blog and the online storefront. Apperceptive used Movable Type to perform both functions, integrating MT with Ultracart to handle inventory and secure transactions. The newJustseeds.org is a snap to update and the content is always fresh. We think it was a great opportunity to connect art and commerce in a meaningful way.

Posted by Tracie Lee at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)