Categories
Debated Endured

The End Of The Crisis

In 2007, I had what I dubbed a “crisis of blogging faith“. Movable Type, my blog tool of choice, had been stagnating on the personal blogging front, while Six Apart was making a lot of noise about the enterprise. Within a day, I had a comment from Anil Dash:

We know we’ve been, honestly, focused elsewhere as we built up all the other work we’ve been doing. But, especially with the success of the other platforms and work like MT Enterprise, it lets us focus resources on the personal version of MT.

After four years of waiting, today I gave up — and migrated to WordPress.

Categories
Debated Disliked Narrated

A Crisis of Blogging Faith

With the rest of the blog world [angry over the Flickr/Yahoo imbroglio this week](http://strange.corante.com/archives/2007/02/02/bad_flickr_no_donut_for_you.php), I’m going to focus my nerd intensity in a different direction.

I’ve been a loyal Movable Type user since 2002. (For the non-nerds, MovableType is the blog software that powers this site.) I burned cycles beta testing MT 3.0. I bought the unlimited personal license for MT 3.0, before the licensing terms went back to being free. I’ve done proof of concepts on MT at both of the companies I’ve been at since graduating from college.

While new blog software like [WordPress](http://www.wordpress.org/) and [Typo](http://trac.typosphere.org/) came onto the scene with a bang, MT didn’t continue to evolve. But I stayed put. I had faith in Six Apart.

While the energy at 6A was poured into their other products – TypePad, LiveJournal, and Vox – and MT continued to stagnate, I stayed put. I had faith in Six Apart.

When Movable Type got an enterprise version, I perked my eyebrows up. I asked about pricing for work – we’re always curious about expanding into new services. But the pricing, even for education, was absurd. So I stayed put. I had faith in Six Apart.

When the “Movable Type News” page became “[Blogs @ Work](http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/news/index)” and began focusing on all of the case studies and hosting partners that 6A has lined up – and thus, barely meeting the definition of “news about the software” – I stayed put. I still had faith in Six Apart. They were expanding their markets, it made sense…in a way.

When the ProNet mailing list started having monthly conference calls – again, *a mailing list about blog software is having conference calls* – I stayed put. I had faith in Six Apart, that they would shake this absurdity. Isn’t the point of having a mailing list so you can communicate? Isn’t the point of having blog software so you can communicate?

As I had more and more emergency requests for consulting from my friends who use MovableType to power their businesses – things like “why aren’t comments scaling” and “why is my server dying under the load” – I could only shrug. These were the reasons I had to stop non-authenticated comments and trackbacks on this blog. Still, I stayed put. I had faith that so long as I decided not to make any sudden changes in the functionality of my blog, MT would continue to do. It’s not like I’m driving tons of traffic.

I’ve continued to have faith for over four years. For me, to stick with the same piece of software for four years is unusual. Web browsers, text editors, mail clients, feed readers – I’m constantly cycling the apps I use. Four years is a show of resolve, a show of faith.
My faith was broken last week.

As seems to always be the case, the thing that broke my faith wasn’t a personal technology nightmare. It wasn’t my server crashing, it wasn’t a new version that broke my layouts.

It was an email. It was this email, with a subject line of “Movable Type News”:

Since we haven’t sent out a Movable Type newsletter in a while, we wanted to start by sharing the biggest recent news in the Movable Type world: Movable Type Enterprise, an entirely new platform built on the rock-solid MT foundation. After five years of success with Movable Type, Movable Type Enterprise was added to the lineup to help blogs scale gracefully within the most powerful and demanding environments.
Movable Type Enterprise has been one of the most successful launches we’ve ever had at Six Apart. The energy that MT Enterprise has brought to our whole community will be paying off in a lot of ways in 2007, but first we wanted to mention why MT Enterprise might be right for you if you need to take your Movable Type blogs to the next level.

It then continues on with five “great” reasons to upgrade from Movable type to Movable Type Enterprise – none of which apply for personal users.

I’m not exactly sure when or how I signed up for said “Movable Type newsletter” – but back-digging through my email, I’ve received the following emails in the same vein:

* 7/26/06 – “A major upgrade to Movable Type now available”
* 9/12/06 – “Movable Type Price Promotion Extended”
* 11/1/06 – “Movable Type Makes the Most of Business Blogging”

The last email, I should note, covers the release of Movable Type Enterprise 1.5. Not 1.0 – 1.5. Of course, Movable Type Enterprise was actually [announced on March 7th, 2006](http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1895,1934831,00.asp), so it’s not as though the product is brand spanking new.

With the strong push about MT Enterprise, I’m left with a gut feeling that *I should not be using MovableType for my blog*. Even without the email, it’s not hard to come to this conclusion – the [Six Apart homepage](http://www.sixapart.com/) plainly says that Movable type is the “best choice for business blogging”. The [Movable Type homepage](http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/) says things like:

* “Helping Every Company Start A Blog”
* “The most popular platform for professional blogging”
* “Build your business on the shoulders of Movable Type”
* “Blogging Platforms for Small Businesses, Enterprises & Publishers at Movable Type”

The only indication that MovableType may not just be for business blogs is the “Recently Updated Sites” box where, depending on when you look, either a good portion or a significant majority of the sites listed are personal blogs.

There are other signs, too: Mena Trott, president of Six Apart and [baby squirrel](http://weblog.burningbird.net/2004/05/14/never-kick-a-sleeping-giant/), updated her official company blog “Mena’s Corner” four times in 2006. Four posts for the entire year. This blog is prominently advertised on the front page of the Six Apart site, billed as:

[a] chance to show the inner workings of a start-up and give the outside world a glimpse into our challenges, our achievements, and our professional passions.

Meanwhile, Mena’s [personal Vox blog](http://mena.vox.com/) has been updated (publicly) eight times so far this year. One month on Vox equals two times the volume of the company blog. And it’s not like there aren’t posts about the inner workings of the company – posts like [the CES post](http://mena.vox.com/library/post/weve-come-a-long-way.html), or [the one about the Vox World Tour contest](http://mena.vox.com/library/post/what-happiness-looks-like.html) would fit perfectly on Mena’s Corner.

Why am I counting this as a sign? Mena’s Corner runs on MovableType; DollarShort runs on Vox. Vox is new, MovableType is not.
I’m not trying to sit here and take potshots at Mena, or Ben, or Anil, or anyone else who works at Six Apart or loves their products. I am not a shareholder. I am not actively paying for any service, support, or product. It’s their company, and they’re welcome to run it however they want. And I certainly understand the enthusiasm for new products – I work in much the same way.

Simultaneously, I understand the need to drive into the enterprise. The research companies keep banging the pot and ladle about business blogging, and I harbor no grudge towards Six Apart for wanting a piece of that pie. But I feel like the software I’m using is being sacrificed to these ends.

That said, I have to be a bit selfish. I have a vested interest in this site: after all, this site is me. This blog has been running for nearly seven years – over a quarter of my life. In that time, I have graduated from college, gotten married, moved three times, crossed thousands of miles, met hundreds of people. I have seen the world, experienced so much, and grown into who I am today. As I have grown, so has this blog.

But the blog cannot solely be powered by me; I can only use the tools available to channel my thoughts and experiences. If the tools refuse to grow, neither can the blog.

If someone from Six Apart is out there and reading this, I leave you with only one question that needs answering:

**Is there any future in Movable Type as a personal (non-business) blogging platform?**

Categories
Found

Thoughts on Movable Type 3.2 Beta

I intalled MT 3.2b1 before I left for work this morning; I’ve had a bit of a chance to use it, and while I’m very impressed on a whole, there’s a few niggling points. Here’s the list:

+ The install process is considerably easier now. The mt CGI will automatically detect that it needs to do the upgrade, and will walk you through the steps. No more uploading, running, and deleting the 10 flavors of upgrade CGIs. Nice.

– The single distribution thing means that if you’re upgrading, you need to be extra careful. I remembered to not nuke my mt.cfg and DB password files, but not my plugins folder, losing the one custom plugin I’ve tweaked. D’oh.

+ The front page FINALLY shows the full range of quick links I’ve been waiting for:

This is in addition to a much revamped sidebar. Finally, I don’t feel like I have to dig a whole lot to get into the frequent places I need to hit on the install.

+++ The feedback spam settings actually work. I can’t believe it – no MT-Blacklist, no SpamLookup, and it’s successfully junking comments and trackbacks. The junk folder keeps the crap out of site/out of mind. Really nice.

– SpamLookup appears to be broken at the moment; I’d like to keep it just to flat out block the crap.

— I’d also like to see a way to set a system-wide feedback score tolerance; I’ve found that +3 works best for my blogs, and I’d like to be able to set this across all of them in one shot rather than going through by hand. I only had four blogs to do this to, but on larger installs this could be a real pain in the ass.

++ Aggregate views of entries/comments/trackbacks are awesome. The system-wide search is also awesome.

+ The ability to turn off comments and trackbacks for the entire site in one click is a godsend when a site is getting spambombed.

+ Individual plugin settings and activity logs per blog were much needed and quite useful.

— Comments aren’t showing up on the individual entries’ “Manage Comments” listing. Very strange.

= There’s a new advanced option to show a field where you can set the filename of an entry, but it doesn’t seem to be working for me.

– I keep running into issues where it says my login is invalid when I’ve saved my login with a cookie. Rather annoying, but hopefully easily fixed.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Cheers, Six Apart – it’s looking like it’ll be a great release. Just squash this small handful of bugs, and I’ll be a happy camper.