Blog turmoil

There’s been a lot of fuss in the blogging world over the last few days about Movable Type, and their new pricing. In a superb bit of customer relations, marketing and logic, they’ve bumped up their prices just a week or so after freebie tool Blogger delivered a big upgrade.

I looked around at various blogging tools late last year. I know MT has long been the titan among blogging tools, but I just couldn’t stomach it… it’s written in Perl (which is a pig of a language. I know it’s powerful, but it’s so damn ugly cryptic. Or maybe I’m just criticising because I’ve never quite got a handle on it); it constantly rebuilds pages; it doesn’t use a database (well, it’s optional. Keeping all that info in text files? Yeuch).

A lot of MT users are proclaiming they will jump to other products. Not that they’re being forced at gunpoint to jump off the version 2.6 cliff into the raging torrent of Upgrade Gorge, of course. But you don’t want to get stuck for too long on a product which has no upgrade path. It’s not like a kettle or some other domestic appliance that you can use until it falls apart. New emerging threats like Comment Spam and security vulnerabilities rear their ugly heads. They might not affect your kettle, but they do threaten anything online, including blogs.

WordPress, which I’ve been using for about six months, has been touted as a replacement for disenfranchised MT users, even though it doesn’t have some of the cooler features such as multiple blogs. But it is utterly free (open source under the GPL) and being actively developed and supported. Good to see the open source ideal working so well. The fabbo new version 1.2 is due out sometime this week, whereupon I might finally pull my finger out and fiddle the page design, fix the trackbacks and add navigation niceties like I’ve been meaning to do for the past few months.

Well, that is if I’ve got nothing better to do.