hokay.. thoughts on movable type
So I have been a busy little beaver setting up this blog and my photoblog. I have it all set up on Movable Type and there are some things I really like about it and some things that kind of suck.
- So here's the scoop:
- Yea:
- It's all in one place, on my own fucking server. No more waiting for LiveJournal or MySpace to crash while I'm typing an entry. I'm lazy enough, I don't need any more excuses to not post. It's all mine, it's backed up, it's all here in case I want to get at the internals.
- It is very configurable. It's basically a subset of HTML. I'm familiar with HTML and CSS so that makes it pretty easy to figure out what the hell is going on.
- Lots of people use it. This means that people have already figured out most of what I want to do. I hate spending time immersed in code, even though I'm fairly clever at it when I put my mind to it. I'd much rather be out taking pictures or down in the basement making music.
- The backend is slick. You can't see it, but that's what I deal with. So, yeah.
- It's free.
- Nay:
- The included templates SUCK. Big time. I can't stand this one, but I'm so burnt from doing the photoblog templates that I don't feel like fucking around with it to change it.
- Documentation can be skimpy. I've had to search out a shitload of third party sites for such seemingly-simple tasks as enabling popup comments. I mean, aren't there like 5,000 photoblogs out there? And NO ONE has designed a SIMPLE way to do this? WTF?
- It's not all that cohesive. For example. I have a LiveJournal, and LiveJournal is owned by the same company as Movable Type. So you'd think they'd make a script that could go through and suck out all my old LiveJournal entries and fart them out into Movable Type. No such luck. Apparently I have to copy and paste two years' worth of entries and comments from one web site to the other. Gay.
- I still can't "broadcast" my journal entries where these things would actually be read. OK so I've got rss, but who the fuck even knows how to use it? I wish there were some easy way to simply syndicate all my Movable Type blog entries to LiveJournal, MySpace and all the other places where my info is posted. There was a plugin for WordPress that posted to LiveJournal, but it looks like the way to do it with Movable Type is to get a paid LiveJournal account and set up an RSS feed.