Search featured: Anil Dash

Six Apart is responsible for Moveable Type and Wordpress blogs?
Of course, the one thing you will think about now is nigritude ultramarine or however that was spelled. And many of you have no clue that Anil is a part of the New York team of geeks responsible for so much more.
Anil Dash has been a speaker at many technological conventions and in light of the danger for anybody using a Wordpress blog these days (*looks around, under the bed, peeks with on eye thru the curtains*), I personally have decided to give Moveable Type another chance after having been too retarded a few years ago to install one by myself.
Anil Dash is one of my old buddies, so clueless me stumbled on yet another great interviewee by accident.

Enjoy this one!

Mike

Mike Dammann: Anil, you have been on the map for a while, but one of the things most people will remember you for is your victory in the first SEO contest ever. How has this popularity in the SEO world affected your regular work and do people still ask you for advice because of it?

Anil Dash: These days, very few people ask for my feedback on SEO, because it’s
been a number of years since that contest. But being aware of search
engines is still a big part of my job, trying to make best practices
automatic on our platforms, so that people don’t have to be aware of
this stuff if they just want to share their ideas or promote their
efforts online.

Mike Dammann: In the past few years you have been responsible for quite a lot of innovations online. Being a part of the team creating Typepad and Moveable Type is one thing that comes to mind.
It seems to me that blogging is what really your passion is. How has blogging changed your life, business and private and what do you recommend taking into consideration when creating an online persona per se thru a blog?

Anil Dash: Blogging’s impacted every part of my life, from being the base of my
career to connecting me to some of my closest friends to helping me
the couple that introduced me to my wife. I think if you consider it
just another communications medium like email or the telephone, but
with some unique powers for reaching a large audience, you can
immediately think of ways to take advantage of it.

Of course, the potential for reaching that audience has some risks as
well. The key thing to keep in mind is that the things you say will be
online forever, with your name attached. I probably was a lot more
antagonistic when I was younger and hadn’t quite learned that lesson.
Similarly, those of us who run sites are responsible for them, and it
makes sense to make sure your authors and commenters are being
accountable for what they publish online.

Mike Dammann: Moveable Type version 4.2. Tell us a little bit about what to expect and in light of the many hack attacks on wordpress blogs, what sort of improvement in blog security can we expect to see?

Anil Dash: Well, Movable Type’s long had a history of really strong security.
This is where I think we really benefit from having a dual-licensed
platform. Many of our best security improvements have come from
submissions created by developers in our open source community, and
then of course our own team of developers has done extensive work on
security as well.

The key thing is, this isn’t about some competition between two
successful blogging companies — this is about what’s good for the
web. It’s a serious danger when there is potential for a huge number
of sites to get hacked or even to be silently attacked and taken over
by malicious coders. It’s just as terrible that so many people who
*don’t* use Movable Type are at risk of having their content removed
entirely from search engines if they get hacked through no fault of
their own. That’s basically facing an SEO death sentence, and it’s
largely avoidable by using tools that don’t have that history of being
insecure repeatedly.

Mike Dammann: How much attention do you yourself pay to seo these days and what are some of the best new things you have learned in the past let’s say 6 months?

Anil Dash: It’s interesting, I’ve kind of changed the way I look at SEO. I think
my initial introduction to it was from some of the worst black hats
kind of defining the space, and there’s been a great evolution as the
importance of regular best practices starts to be the focus. I mean,
if you’re selling enlargement pills, maybe you need to be super
aggressive with what you’re doing, but for 99% of publishers and
businesses, they’d do well just to follow a few simple rules and not
having to know all the tips and tricks.

So the thing I’ve mostly been trying to pay attention to recently is,
how can we at Six Apart (as a company that makes publishing tools)
make it automatic that a lot of the fundamental SEO rules are being
followed, so that regular people don’t have to even think about such
things.

Mike Dammann: Looking at http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/06/movable-type-a-history-of-secu.html I need to ask you what you are planning to do to help make it easier to install Moveable Type. And also easier for not so tech savvy bloggers to get security updates without having to hire anybody. Can we expect something new on cpanel anytime soon? Which are some of the new features coming up and also: Do you believe that the majority of recent attacks on Wordpress blogs came thru plugins and is it true that themes aren’t code, so they can’t have security bugs? I have also noticed that when a MT database goes down due to high traffic from Digg or whatever, you can actually still access the content of your blog. What else is there that makes MT unique and better than WP?

Anil Dash: There’s a few different issues all tied in together here, but at the
highest level, we don’t focus on our competitors who make software, we
try to focus on what’s good for the web as a whole. So, we can do
things like making TypePad AntiSpam the only totally free, open source
blog spam prevention system. Of course, the competitor in my points
out that it works better than Akismet, but we’ve made it freely
available for people whether they’re using WordPress or Movable Type
or anything else, because we think it’s good for the web. Same with
our Blog It application for the iPhone or for Facebook, which work
with any tool out there.

With that in mind, though, there’s still a lot we can learn from other
platforms out there, and installation is a good example. By its very
nature, MT does a lot more out of the box than most tools, without
needing third-party plugins, and partially as a result of that,
installation can be tricky. So we’re making available
completely-configured systems with MT in formats such as virtual
machines and Amazon machine images for EC2. That means we’re
definitely interested in working with the Cpanels and Fantasticos of
the world about integrating Movable Type.

Here’s the thing, though: A five-minute install doesn’t save you any
time if you’re having to repeat it every other week for a new security
update. With MT, it’s very common for a major release version to be
completely supported and secure for a year, during which time you
don’t have to touch your system at all. So the biggest thing we can do
for security is to reduce the upgrade fatigue that makes people not
want to stay up-to-date with their software.

We also make some smart choices with the application itself. While
we’ve supported dynamic publishing for years, we still are huge
advocates of publishing static pages, because then you don’t have to
worry about that Blue Screen of Death, the dreaded “Database
Connection Error” that other tools always show when a site gets Dugg.
In the past, static pages had a tradeoff in publishing time, but MT
4.2 is several times faster in publishing and supports some really
smart caching abilities by default, so a lot of that wait time is
gone.

And Matt Mullenweg himself placed the blame for most security bug
reports on the WP community’s theme developers and plugin developers.
I’m not sure if that’s true, or if it’s fair, but I think it’s hard to
expect all plugin and theme developers to be completely secure all of
the time. As a result, the vast majority of what people would use a
plugin for on WordPress can be done using native, secure, tested
Movable Type template tags instead.

Mike Dammann: Where can we see you next? What is new in your personal life? Share something readers may not know and give a few more words of advice for anybody who wants to be successful online.

Anil Dash: I’m actually taking a little bit of time off from travel for a while,
though I’m usually running around nonstop speaking at conferences. As
a proud New Yorker, I’m really looking forward to the Web 2.0 Expo
coming to New York this fall.

In my personal life, I’ve just been enjoying being in the city in the
summer. From the great food to an infinite number of things to do,
summer in New York City is still a pretty magical thing.

As far as advice goes, I’m not sure I’ve got any insights that people
wouldn’t figure out on their own. But what’s worked well for me is to
pick something that I genuinely love, even when people thought it was
crazy and there was no money in it. And I’ve just stayed focused on
that for nearly every waking hour for a few years now, even long after
people said “oh, that’s old news” or whatever. And as a result, every
opportunity or achievement I could have aspired to has opened up to
me.

I’d like people to remember that I don’t take myself too seriously,
and that I really appreciate that I get to have so much fun and have
such a good life.