HuffIt is a social news reader built for the Huffington Post. HuffIt lets you decide which news stories should get the most attention. You can submit and Huff the news from anywhere in the world and the most popular stories will appear on the Huffit front page. Registered users can browse the headlines and Huff their favorite stories. Stories with the most Huffs are promoted to the "Most Popular News" page. Huffit links to user profiles to show you who else is huffing and who else has huffed the most popular stories. A history of a user's Huffs is saved on his/her own public page. Apperceptive built the application from the ground up, including a news reader application, ranking system, template design and deployment.

Serious Eats is the brainchild of one of our favorite food writers, Ed Levine, as well as some of our other favorite bloggers. The site offers up original video and text features in addition to a burgeoning Talk section where Serious Eaters can ask and answer culinary quandaries.

Serious Eats is built on Movable Type Enterprise with a few custom plugins by Apperceptive. One of our favorite features is the user profiles, which lists your posts, comments and comments that have appeared since you posted.

We helped New York Magazine launch their first blog for fashion week, followed by their second about food and dining in New York City. Timed to launch for Fashion Week 2006, Apperceptive produced the stylesheets and templates and deployed them on Movable Type along with a few custom plugins. The Magazine can now roll out blogs on their own, turning the venerable weekly print magazine into a daily destination for New Yorkers in the know.

Washington Post Newsweek Interactive (WPNI) is redefining the Op-Ed page. A masthead’s editorial opinion used to be starkly set out as “pro or con” every evening before going to print. Now the opinions can come from up to hundreds of trusted sources, and letters to the editor come as thousands of comments a day. The best content is chosen by the editors and published to the front page.

We designed, implemented and deployed On Faith — a global conversation on religion with a panel of distinguished figures from the academy, the faith traditions, and journalism — and PostGlobal, a similar site focusing on current events. The sites are powered by Movable Type Enterprise and knit together with custom plugins to meet the requirements of the editorial, management, and systems team at WPNI. In addition to responding to the question of the day, participating panelists also have their own full Movable Type blog.

After the initial success of their OnFaith and PostGlobal blogs, Washington Post Newsweek Interactive asked Apperceptive to take the discussion a step further and develop a live chat application. The addition allows their stable of contributors to debate issues live on the site with updates relayed to readers as they happen. When the chat is over, the transcript is archived. The application is driven by a Movable Type plugin that allows any of WPNI's existing blog authors to participate in a chat.

As Director of Online Advocacy for Human Rights Watch, John Emerson implemented a major redesign of this massive site and oversaw the development of a large, multilingual content management system supporting distributed maintenance for over 150,000 documents. Emerson also produced multimedia content, designed Flash-based and printed maps, and drafted online campaigning materials to supplement hrw’s advocacy work.

One of the largest blog networks in the country, iVillage employed David Jacobs to assist with the design, software architecture, and delivery of a network of over thirty blogs — with more added every month. The iVillage blog network hosts hundreds of authors, tens of thousands of comments, and millions of visitors.

Gardenweb is the largest online community of gardeners — several times over. Gardenvoices uses Movable Type and reBlog software to compile a list of the “best of” garden blogs from several of the most active community members and is moderated by a longtime Gardenweb participant. By spotlighting the existing voices in the community instead of replacing them, the site earned the trust and rave reviews of this notoriously judgmental group and was featured on cnn.com. David Jacobs built the software and servers that powers Garden Voices and John Emerson implemented the beautiful design and templates. Gardenweb is an iVillage property.

Just Vision is the non-profit that produced the film Encounter Point, directed by Ronit Avni and Julia Bacha (Control Room). Movable Type is used as a CMS to power the entire site, including the Flash-based timeline, profiles of 180 peace activists, news and articles about the film, and the issues surrounding it. We developed an architecture that would support hundreds of profiles, news items, and calendar items, all in multiple languages and templated views. We also designed a look that would appeal equally to the film's core constituencies: Israeli and Palestinian peace workers. The website will be translated into Hebrew and Arabic this year.

Entertainment Access Spotlight is a community-driven, branded portal for American Express that lists the best entertainment options in New York City, San Francisco and Chicago. American Express is already considered a prestigious brand, and they wanted to offer their top customers the opportunity to contribute ideas and participate in events promotion. Apperceptive deployed the templates, recommendation engine, and question & answer system using Movable Type and custom plugins.

As MediaRights.org was growing from 3,000 pageviews a month to 200,000, the legacy CMS and database were becoming unmanageable for an organization the size of MediaRights. As Director of Technology, David Jacobs designed and programmed a highly customized version of Movable Type which replaced the old CMS. One of the design challenges was accommodating the multiple constituencies who identify as MediaRights members: librarians, students, filmmakers, actors, distributors and activists needed to feel equally at home on the site.

In 2003, David Jacobs grew the The Media That Matters Film Festival website from a subpage on MediaRights.org to a standalone website that handles hundreds of thousands of pageviews while streaming high quality video files and dynamically generated “take action” links. The film festival was the first Movable Type powered website to feature streaming video and won the “Best Non-Profit Website” award at South by Southwest. The same architecture that powered the website in 2003 remains today. John Emerson was responsible for implementing the 2005 edition of the festival’s templates and designs.