MT: Jumping the Shark?
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James Joyner | Saturday, May 15, 2004 |
It looks like the backlash against Movable Type’s new pricing policy and user restrictions has turned into an avalanche. As Kevin Aylward details, users are having difficulty with the transition between versions; HostingMatters, the biggest player in the blog hosting game, is recommending that its users go with another platform; and competitors pMachine and WordPress are making aggressive moves to take advantage of the situation. Indeed, even everyone’s favorite whipping boy, Blogger, has made massive improvements in its system which may make it a viable alternative again. (Ironically, pMachine is going to be charging for its “good” version once the promotion is over.)
Several prominent bloggers have made the switch to WordPress recently and seem to be raving about it. I may give it a go myself at some point although I’m reasonably happy with MT. Indeed, the only real complaint I have with it is that it’s a massive web space hog for prolific posters such as myself. A lot of sites have gone to the rather inelegant weekly archiving format instead of individual posts to get around this limitation, which I refuse to do.
Steven Taylor and Suburban Kelley have thoughts as well.
About the Author: James Joyner is the publisher of Outside the Beltway and the managing editor of the Atlantic Council. He's a former Army officer, Desert Storm vet, and college professor with a PhD in political science from The University of Alabama. He lives just outside the Beltway in Alexandria, Virginia with his wife and infant daughter.
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I've been too lazy to switch from Blogger, and now they're much closer to what I'd like to see (but not quite there yet).
As it stands now, if I were to switch, it would be to WordPress. But as the International President of Procrastinators Anonymous, it may be a while before that happens.
Doc, you'll likely trim off two thirds of your disc space usage considering the only static files you would be keeping ar ethe images you host. It's a beautiful thing... (and as one of the early adopters of WP and one of its most vigorous pimps, I couldn't help but grin over 6A's shooting itself in both feet.)
HostingMatters has reversed its original "go with another platform." The problem was with the MT3's odd "one installation per CPU" requirement. HM's servers has no single CPU servers. MT pulled the idiotic clause from the license yesterday.
I'm waiting to see. I'm a beta tester for MT3, but I have a free ExpressionEngine package and Wordpress ready for testing... just in case.
Tangential point:
When something as boring and geeky as "MT" can "jump the shark", is it not a signal that "jump the shark" has now jumped the shark?
Sorry Kate, the act of saying that jumping the shark has jumped the shark has jumped the shark.
I'm soooo out of the loop.
I've never understood everyone's problem with Blogger. Sure, it's basic as hell and you can't host images and files and what not, but as long as I can put words from my brain onto my site for free then there's no problem.
Keith,
When I was on BlogSpot in early 2003,it was simply awful. It was down half the time and there were all sorts of problems with it. Plus, the lack of inline comments, screwed up archives, etc. It has been better more recently after some pretty serious upgrades, but it's still not as robust as a blog on your own host.
The difference in WordPress and Moveabletype is simple; dynamic pages vs. static pages. MT, at least through v. 2.661, simply doesn't compare (except cosmetically).
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