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May 08, 2003
Why MovableType
I started blogging using Radio Userland. I really liked the usability. It's a great way to start blogging, and also very powerful for experienced bloggers. But as I got to experience other blogging software, and got some experience Radio, I realized that Radio was not right for me. Some of the reasons I decided to go to MovableType.
1. Jim can't break it as easily.
2. It's Perl-based. It has a boat-load of plug-ins and a very active development community. I'm comfortable with Perl, and hope to contribute with my own MT modules. I am not proficient at XML or OPML, and found the Radio back-end poorly documented. Most of my experiences (usually involving Jim) with adding plug-ins to Radio were bad.
3. It's Web-based. One thing I really liked about Radio was it's off-line capabilities. And the WYSIWIG editor was great, if you are on Windows with IE. But I hated that I could only have one computer to blog from. MT has a great Web editing interface (not WYSIWIG), plus I can use a number of XML-RPC tools (with WYSIWIG) for desktop and off-line editing.
4. It's designed for independent operation. Radio was designed for use with the Radio hosting service. Making it work with my own personal server required opening up some security holes, and I lost access to many of the cool Radio features by not using it on their server. MT runs on my server, and was designed to work that way.
5. Draft mode. Radio has "Post" and "Publish". but they are very primitave. MT has true CMS Draft/Publish management, so I can pre-write blogs when I'm on a roll, and finish them up later.
6. Comments. Radio has comments, but they're managed in an ackward way, through the Radio hosting service (probably something that would work better if I wasn't hosting my own blog). So I turned comments off. MT handles comments better, so they're on (along with TrackBack and blog pinging).
7. Search. Radio doesn't have search built in. You can kludge it with Google or some third-party search engine. But that's lame (well, except for Phil's), it's not integrated, you have no control over it, and most search engines don't understand blogs, so you get links to the wrong place. MT has good search capabilities (including regexp's). And it supports Google SOAP integration.
I'm excited about what I can do with MovableType. I've been using MT for several months already for some other sites, so I've looked forward to the time when I got irritated enough with Radio to make the move.
I'd still like to see "MovableType Unleased". Though I came across this one that looks promising.
Posted by pete at May 8, 2003 07:33 PM
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