This site is published using my own bastard software, and sometimes I regret this fact ;) It’s buggy and crummy [the software that is], and gets less releasable everytime I add a band-aid fix. It was never intended to handle a whole site, it just ended up that way, and everytime I’ve given it to a friend to try out it has crashed immediately, much to my chagrin.

There are much better ways to publish a blog, and most people are pr0bably already aware of the two main options, Movable Type and Blogger . But last time I checked MT looked too scary for the average human to install, and Blogger was just a bit crummy, relying on updating your blog via the blogger site and interface.

Anyhow, I thought I’d just mention a third viable option, which I recently checked out and was very impressed by. It’s called WordPress, and is a host-it-yourself PHP solution. The install was pretty much as simple as the readme said, and feature-wise it seems to support all the standard bloggy functionality. A test blog took me less than an hour to setup [and most of that was spent configuring personal options]. You just need to have MySQL and PHP installed on your web server, and you’re in business.

I’ll probably stick with my own software for now, because conversion would be a major pain, and I really prefer a WYSIWYG editor, but if I was starting from scratch I wouldn’t hesitate to use WordPress.

UPDATE: Another reason you might not want to dive into Movable Type right at this moment is that it has recently pissed off a bunch of users by changing its licensing. Ben [an MT user] has some interesting thoughts on this reaction. Mark Pilgrim went so far as to convert his site from MT to Wordpress, dramatically summing up his decision:

It’s not about who has a right to make a living (everyone does); it’s not about how nice Ben and Mena are (I’ve met them, they are very nice); and it’s certainly not about eating. I’ve taken the $535 that Movable Type would have cost me, and I’ve donated it to the WordPress developers.

It’s not about money; it’s about freedom.

__________

UPDATE (2005): I did eventually convert to Wordpress, and have been generally very pleased with it.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2004 at 5:34 pm and is filed under Misc. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.