Sign number #439 that a

Sign number #439 that a geek is feeling a little under the weather: he/she considers his custom-built, highly-designed, butt-slow, imperfectly-implemented-but-truly-beautiful-to-the-right-eyes weblog software and thinks about moving to Movable Type. Suggestions?

Comments

[jo]

Hello Erik,
I seem to be suffering from the very problem!

Archives still don't work properly, comment box takes my own URL instead of the commentor's, etc.

Still, I too think it is too nice to ditch and will give it another month or two ;-)when maybe I am feeling better.
Then swap .php for MT .cgi, like all the other bloggers.

[Taran Rampersad]

If you have problems...
Drop me a note. Been running MT after moving from Greymatter... The last 6 months have been trouble free.

Installation is a breeze, just follow the instructions. ;)

[Jeff Seifert]

Trying to move off of MT
I once had custom software running my blog, but after it developed some nasty bugs that I didn't have the time or patience to try to fix, I moved the blog to MT.

Now I want to move to something else. MT has the annoying habit of recreating every page each time you modify a template, which doesn't really lend itself to experimenting with the look and feel of my site. Every tiny change requires me to wait while it chugs out 800 static HTML pages. Something that would generate pages on-the-fly when requested would be much better for me.

Then there's the licensing of MT, which is rather onerous if you ever want to use it for something other than personal use. (http://www.movabletype.org/commercial_download.shtml)

So far, Syncato (http://www.syncato.org) looks to be the best choice, but alas I have no time to make the transition.

[Anil]

How to pick MT
Obviously, I'm biased, but what I've been advocating to people re: blog tools, if they're technically inclined, is to use MT and then build plugins or customizations on top of it. That way, you get a ton of functionality "for free" from the app itself and from the plugins that are available, and you can focus on just developing the specific features that you want to innovate with. There's also the potential for sharing those features with a big base of other users, as well.

And you can generate dynamic pages with no rebuilds from MT, which is what I did for a long time through PHP. (This was well before I started working for Six Apart, incidentally.) There's an undocumented dynamic script included in the current version of MT, and there are many dynamic templates for languages like PHP and ASP if you want to pull your posts directly from the database.

[sissy sissy]

sissy
u r big sissy wah, my software...,wah, my life? I've got your blog in my pants baby. Is it Mr. Caulfield? I wuv animules. So how you been besides cryin? I think we got off on wrong foot. P.S. Thanx but, nothanx to your answering machine from hell software. Some people like to use technology to avoid people when they wish a moment of privacy or mystery or whatever. Whazzup sissy?

[Manu Sharma]

More MThoughts
I'm not on MT but the scalability issue has come up before. Thought this might provide some hints.

[Erik Benson]

I'm actually quite familiar with MT, having set it up for a bunch of co-workers and using it myself to power small side projects. It's a great tool, and one of the things I like about it is that it's so extensible. So, it's really tempting, despite being the most popular player out there. Jeff, Syncato looks really great too, I need to look into that some more. I think xpath queries may not exactly be a primary desired feature of mine, but it sure would be fun to play around with. I could spend all my time playing around with xpath, latent semantic indexing, mod_perl, Mason, HTML::Template, heirarchies, and all that and not even be too concerned about not having enough time to write anything with the tool. On the other hand, I could also spend all my time writing and be entertained long enough to never worry about the tools. I'm going to think more about exactly what I couldn't do with Movable Type that is worth building all of the features that it does have, and possibly refactor things in a bit. At the moment, work and other side projects doesn't really give me enough time to really start up something new anyway. Thinking about refactoring my blogging software is much like comfort food for me, but I think after a few nights of good sleep I'm feeling a little bit better than I was before.

As for Sissy, I'm enjoying your helpful criticism of my writing, side projects, and emotional states. I will continue to try and keep improving so that one day I might have something worthy of your praise. Keep it coming.

[leo hernandez]

an opinion
I think you should read this article .

[Erik Benson]

Cool article, Ben. Have you heard anything else since this article was published?

[Jay Allen]

Whining whining whining
Jeff Seifert wrote:
"MT has the annoying habit of recreating every page each time you modify a template,"

That's by design. The alternative is to dynamically create each page on page load (as Anil suggested) which is great for experimenting but can kill a server (and a hosting bill) like nothing you've ever seen.

"...which doesn't really lend itself to experimenting with the look and feel of my site. Every tiny change requires me to wait while it chugs out 800 static HTML pages."

The way to do this is to pick one entry (say something you posted a year ago), change the template and then save THAT entry. All archives containing that entry (individual, category, monthly, whatever) will be rebuilt but nothing more.

If you dont like the result, then change then template again and rebuild. When I am experimenthing, I do it on my live site and no one in the world would know the difference. The only exception is if someone leave a comment, which would subsequently rebuild the archives of THAT entry. Small price to pay.

As an aside, might I add that it's always preferable to use one's brain or seek out a solution in this great knowledge repository we call the Internet than to sit around and whine needlessly and ignorantly.

"Then there's the licensing of MT, which is rather onerous if you ever want to use it for something other than personal use."

Yeah, I hate that. But at least it's better than Photoshop or Windows. They make you pay even for personal use!

Come on you cheap ass. Six Apart is a company, not a charity. Movable Type is a piece of software that Ben and Mena have put over two entire years of their lives into. And despite that, they dont require that you pay a goddamed cent to run your "what I ate for lunch today" blog. Excuse them if they feel they deserve to make a few pennies on someone who will make a lot more on the shoulders of their work.