Welcome to the World of Blogware
If you've tuned in recently you'd notice that I've been fiddling with the site.
Contact forms have been added throughout and Opinions of the Wolf got a major restructure behind the scenes — explaining why you got a 404 error instead of the page you expected. Parts of it — News and the new Opinions section — also left the land of flat HTML and entered the exciting new world of blogware.
I had a play with BlogComp. They have a nifty Blog Tool feature comparison that allowed me to narrow down my choices to GreyMatter (GM) and MovableType (MT) — both applications that I could host myself without having to go through a central host like Blogger. GM got first choice for two reasons; 1) I'm familiar with Noah Grey and 2) if I wanted to change over the MT later, MT had the capability to import GM content.
GM has fewer features than MT, but this wasn't a major concern during testing as I didn't really know what I would and wouldn't need. I found GM to be very simple to install and the directions were easy to follow; a few changes to a handful of files noting the relevant directories of where things live and I was up and running in a matter of minutes. A few hours of tweaking the templates to my satisfaction and GM had a shiny new skin that looked like the rest of my site.
I did start to discover some limitations that would effect me, like the ability to run multiple blogs, so I was off to have a whack at MT.
First off, MT is larger than GM. It is far more complicated to install and the instructions are nowhere near as clear cut as GM. I hit a problem trying to login to MT initially and couldn't find anything to indicate where I'd gone wrong. Fortunately the Movable Type Support Forum sorted that problem. Turns out I'd missed running a build file — I'd swear it wasn't in the instructions, but maybe I was suffering from domestic blindness.
Once up and running I found that MT has a very professional GUI, easy on the eye and simple to move around in. Setting up the templates was a lot more time consuming than GM. The search template, for example, is not accessible via the GUI and has to be manually updated and reloaded.
In the end I decided that MT was the application I wanted to use. The extra features that it offered over GM made it worth the hassle of setting it up.
If you're just dipping your toe in the blogware waters, I'd recommend GreyMatter. It is simple to install, easy to customise and has clear directions for use. But if you are comfortable installing and tweaking programs, then the benefits of MovableType's extended features well outweighs the annoying install problems.
Published Epinions — 26.05.2003
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