So. For as long as I’ve had this blog (or another one somewhere on the domain) I’ve run Moveable Type. First it was because all the cool kids were doing it, then it was because I was passingly familiar with the system. And frankly, a frillion years ago when I was just starting to want to have my own website, WordPress was a hot mess.
Some of the things I’ve always looked for in any kind of blogging platform are: ease of use and ease of customization (both on the back end and for the blog site itself). Moveable Type used to provide that for me. But a couple of iterations ago, call it about four or five months, their interface got crazy different. Enough that I didn’t have the technical know-how to be able to code my own sites. Not too much of a big deal, as they provide a Style Catcher, a plugin that lets you “catch” themes from MT compatible websites and skin your blog in them.
Except that around the same time that I decided to move the blog from sycamoregrove.org/blog to just sycamoregrove.org, every single one of those sites went away. I couldn’t find a decent theme for love or money. About that time, I discovered that my webhost’s Control Panel offered a simplified WordPress installation, and started to consider switching my blogging platform.
I didn’t want to make such a huge decision (I have a long-running, if not oft-updated blog) overnight, so I thought about it for a long time. Today, when I noticed that MT had released version 5.something-or-other, I decided to upgrade. If I hated the new interface, I’d switch. I uninstalled Moveable Type, as they suggest, and reinstalled version 5.whatever. I get an error message, telling me that one of the files can’t be found. I double check the file. It’s in the right place. I try again. Still get the message. I overwrite the file. Still the message appears.
At that point, I say “fuck it,” delete everything, and install WordPress. Which works like a fucking charm. The installation takes, literally, five minutes (if it wasn’t offered through my cPanel, it would probably have taken longer) and even updates to the newest version for me with one click of a button. Ten minutes of searching on the web and I find fifteen-ish themes that I download and install, and I don’t even have to unzip them first!
One of the things that always vexed me with MT was the lack of interface between the blog dashboard and Flickr. If I wanted to include photos from my Flickr site, I had to open them, select a size, and copy/paste the raw code. Even the “blog this” feature available on the Flickr website will only publish one photo per blog post. WordPress, on the other hand, has a plugin that allows me to browse my photostream, select pictures, choose the size at which I want to display them, and blog as many of them as I want to in a single post. I’m not trying to say that MT didn’t have plugins, they did. But I found it was less intuitive on the MT side. I hadn’t even thought to look for a Flickr plugin for MT; they simply don’t make as big a deal over them. On Wordpress, it was the first thing I did, other than look for themes.
…
Okay, so that was a whole lot of ranting. And explanation. If you didn’t make it through the whole thing, I understand. And for those of you who just skipped to the end in hopes of a pretty picture, the gist of it is this: I got a new blogging platform and it’s really cool! I’m much more likely to blog now. And, a picture.
