From the Orient

Wordpress has a final RC available and I’ve installed it without significant issue.

“Papascott”:http://www.papascott.de/2004/05/21/3023.php says something that has been on my mind this week :-

bq.:http://www.papascott.de/2004/05/21/3023.php With WordPress, if you want to do anything slightly different from what it intends (for example, customizing the text of the monthly archive links, or listing the 5 latest comments), you end up writing a hack, essentially rewriting one of its PHP functions to do what you want. But PHP is at least logical and well-documented. Movable Type has it’s own well-documented but esoteric template language, for which you can find plugins to make it even more esoteric

You have two options if you are a coder and want to write weblog software that is specific to your needs. Firstly, you can write your own weblogging system (e.g. “Epistula”:http://www.aquarionics.com/#article-75) or you can use a pre-built package and write hacks or plugins for it. As long as the plugin system is flexible enough, and in a language you know, you have the benefit of not having to code a system from the ground up and have the benefit of a well written performant weblog without having to design it yourself.

MovableType didn’t work for me because I didn’t know Perl. Wordpress is better because PHP looks easier to learn, but I’m holding off writing any plugins or hacks until 1.2 is released. I don’t feel confident enough in the language to contribute yet. Also, when I did have time last night to look over the forums and see what others were doing, there was a database problem and I couldn’t access anything. (btw, the best plugin system was in “Vellum”:http://www.kryogenix.org/code/vellum/)

Reading a few of the trackbacks at “Mena’s request for feedback on licensing (Commendable attempt to gather feedback but it will only produce more biased results)”:http://www.sixapart.com/log/2004/05/how_are_you_usi.shtml, I am quite stunned at how many blogs people run. “I’m running 27 non-profit personal blogs with 43 authors each all about Brittany Spears” (or something. Where do people find the time. I’ve had up to three blogs running concurrently, but the others always die and I only really count this one as currently active.

The problem with the MovableType license is not really price; there is a free version after all. It is the limitations imposed. Suddenly, MT has gone from being a very flexible tool, inspiring creativity to one with a limitation that if you want to be more creative you will incur a financial penalty for doing so.

Limitations on the use of a product will only stifle use of the product and in the case of weblog, it will stifle creativity and lead to users finding alternative products to do what they want.

Derek Powazek explains how he runs his very popular creative weblogs

bq.:http://www.powazek.com/2004/05/000405.html Similar story [to Fray] on City Stories. There are two blogs, one public and one private, and a ton of authors. 30 at last count. Again, it’s central to the concept of the site to have a lot of authors. That’s why I chose Movable Type to power it.

If someone was using the personal license and was at it’s limit, and had a crazy idea for a new weblog would they really bother to start it up if it was going to cost them extra money to do so? Or would they put it on the shelf for another day? Or would you instead start it using different weblog software to see if it popular? And if it works, would you bother changing it back?

I had an idea for a multi-author story weblog where all the authors were me. Is that one author or five? How could I prove it was all me to the licensing police? The idea was that you weren’t supposed to know I was writing it all, in fact you weren’t supposed to know which author wrote which post, and you were supposed to work it out. The free MT license covers me currently, but I would have had to pay $70 to set that idea up. I wouldn’t have paid for this pie-in-the-sky idea. I was too lazy to get it off the ground anyway, but that’s another story.

You’ve got to like a technology that allows people to completely pan a launch of a new version of a product on its own website

First trackback title - “Looks Like I’ll Be Dumping MovableType Soon”:http://www.megacity.org/blog/archives/001733.php

How long before the trackback entries are removed from that page?

From Shelley: Personal Edition of MT3.0 is a staggering “$70 (reduced from $100)”:http://secure.sixapart.com/

I can understand why they want to charge for use, but that does seem a little excessive, doesn’t it? Don’t they know who the users of MT are?

Yes, there is a free version, but it is crippleware. 1 author and 3 weblogs; I have 4 weblogs setup to run this site + other abandoned weblogs. What happens when you start a new weblog and close one of the others, do you have do delete of one the three.

I tried to download MT3.0 free edition, but got hit with a “You must be registered with TypeKey” message. Why? And when I went to register (I don’t want to be one of those people Mark is going on about) I got redirected to this URL — http://www.faketypepad.com:9120/t/typekey/register which gave a 502 - Bad Gateway.

faketypepad? I’m not registering there, mate.

There is a difference between a hosted service and an installed product, but who is going to pay that much for a product when there are free alternatives?

Me, I’m going to roll my own, or go with pyBloxsum (me no can do perl or php). I’d never pay for a product of this nature (I would pay for Typepad if I needed to have a hosted blog). The incentive is that “bloglines”:www.bloglines.com will surely go for the payment route eventually and I will want to have a personalised version of my own before then.

+UPDATE: After reading more about this, I’d like to clarify some further thoughts.+

+It appears the licensing is on an honour system, so it isn’t technically crippleware, but you’ll probably get cease and desist emails instead. It isn’t Free Software, but then neither was MT2.x. Given my recent preference for free software (you can blame Lugradio for this), I would turn away from MT anyway.+

+I can hardly have a go at the pricing anyway, considering “who I work for”:http://www.nwfusion.com/news/2002/0327oracle.html. It looks like MT doesn’t want to be seen as blog software, but CMS software and wants to overcharge the same way other commercial CMS software do.+

+The 1 author, 3 weblog rule for the free version wouldn’t be so bad if there were new features that meant that all the extra little sidebar blogs would be unneccessary to run it (hierarchical categories for example). I have read that there are few new features of this type and the backend has been rewritten.+

+One final thought, will developers for this “platform” be expected to charge for their new plugins?+

??Matt Haughey?? has a feature on some extra things you can do with MT

I’ve already implemented the About idea I while ago, but I went one step further. The content of my About page is a MT entry. With an About index template set to include just the latest entry in the About category, you can use “CatEntries”:http://markpasc.org/code/mt/CatEntries/ to exclude anything from the About category in your index page or RSS feed. Then updating the About page is as easy as editing the entry, or if you want to write something new, you only have to write a complete new entry.

I did the same with an Announcement category. The entry in question (I was going away for a few days) was excluded from the main index, but appeared in a special box, highlighted at the side. I did this as an experiment, because I felt that it wasn’t a real weblog entry as such.

The database idea is a good one, but you’d really want more fields, and I’ve seen it done for Photologs in the past. Trouble is MT just isn’t flexible enough in the respect. You have to map fields such as Entry keyword to a URL for example. I understand MT Pro will have capability, and it was something I tried to get Stuart to include in Vellum.

If you only have limited needs, and don’t have the ability to use Python, Perl or even PHP to directly access a database, then using MT in this way is a very good workaround.

[Currently listening to I'm Going To Spain by The Fall from the album The Infotainment Scan]

I’ve just installed the beta version of MT Plugin Manager.

Seems to require Perl 5.8, but I’ve only got 5.6. Got an error about Storable.pm which is “this bug here”:http://bugs.mt-plugins.org/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0000063. You can get round this by installing (or having a super responsive sysadmin install) “Storable.pm”:http://search.cpan.org/author/AMS/Storable-2.07/

Next I got an error about a mismatch version of MD5.pm (sorry about the lack of full error messages but I forgot to note them, I don’t know Perl at all and you can see them in the links anyway) which was fixed by downloading a different MD5.pm “as reported here”:http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?s=eda06535fb56e3d4d5029c8cf6b2ece1&act=ST&f=20&t=23373&st=15 (in fact the tar ball contains two versions of MD5.pm, only one of the two works).

So, not an easy install, but this is beta and it is always good to report these problems at this stage rather than in production.

So, now it doesn’t know about any of my installed plugins, so I thought I’d let it install the latest version of “CatEntries”:http://markpasc.org/weblog/2003/06/29_catentries_25.html but actually installing anything fails with :-

bq. Can’t locate auto/Compress/Zlib/autosplit.ix in @INC

At which point I gave up and “logged a bug”:http://bugs.mt-plugins.org/bug_view_page.php?bug_id=0000082

*UPDATE*: The version of MD5.pm I’d installed didn’t allow me to actually post this entry, so I had to remove it. I’m glad I don’t know Perl.