halfacanuck: Why I switched (part II)

December 09, 2004 - 10:30 PM

Why I switched (part II)

The astute amongst you may have noticed a subtle hint on my old blog that things have changed around a bit. You're right! Have a beer. Or a smoothie. I've switched from Blogger to MoveableType (MT) hosted on my own server.

There are lots of reasons for me doing this, but here are a few:

It lets me do stuff like that. What you just did – "click here to read more" – without jumping through Javascript hoops. I tend to write quite long posts sometimes, and I think that feature makes the main page way more tidy.
The MT template system is much more flexible and powerful than Blogger's. I'm not really using that power right now, but I intend to add cool new features as I go along.
This blog is hosted on my own server, which means if things do go wrong (and Blogger does seem to have its problems sometimes) I can fix them myself. Also this means I can implement a proper hit tracking system instead of relying on a fairly crappy third-party hit counter.
MT supports such nifty things as trackback autodiscovery, entry categories (which I'll add sometime soon), and a bunch of other stuff that's way too nerdy to go into details about.
MT has tons and tons (and tons) of plugins that add features. I've not investigated many yet, but I will be.

All in all I decided that it was worth switching over, despite being a lot of work (two days in total) and despite everyone having to update their links and bookmarks and feed URLs again (sorry).

I've imported all my Blogger posts and also all the Haloscan comments, so as far as content goes it should be identical.

If you see any problems please let me know.

Comments and trackbacks

Here are the erudite, piercing and profoundly arousing comments and trackbacks left so far by my alert readers regarding this entry (you too can make me tumescent by leaving a comment of your own):

I look forward to seeing the added power when you get it on here. What kinda bells'n'whistles are you talking of, btw?

Caz – December 9, 2004 10:57 PM

Oh, you know. Bells. Whistles. That kind of thing.

Ross Thomas – December 9, 2004 11:08 PM

Oh. Thanks for that most enlightening explanation. I feel that I have a full handle on what to expect now. :p

Caz – December 9, 2004 11:09 PM

You are welcome.

Ross Thomas – December 9, 2004 11:16 PM

OK, I'm following you. Er, that is, I'm changing my bookmarks and such. I'm not actually following you, because that would be creepy.

I actually like the format of your site quite a bit. Lately I've been trying to make my site look less Xanga-y, not that I have anything but mad Pr0pZ for the Xanga community, but because a blog should have its own individual characteristics, and there are things I can imagine but can't easily do. Mostly little things, like the "member since blah blah blah" under my profile pic, annoy me, and I'm getting tired of hunting down and looking at source codes that I don't really understand to make the modification.

Plus, even after modifications, it still looks Xanga-y to me. And some modifications seem impossible. For example, I recently tried to get the HaloScan comment feature working, but I don't think Xanga supports it.

Still, I'll probably stick with Xanga, for all that, at least until I buckle down and learn more about html code.

Aren't you glad I shared all this?

Sisyphus – December 10, 2004 08:36 AM

Following me would be both creepy and fruitless, because I don't really go anywhere of interest.

As for the Xanga thing, I completely agree. I love the "community" aspect of Xanga, but I hate that it's so inflexible. I did the best I could to make my Xanga page look individualized (before my premium subscription ran out, that is), but there's only so much you can do. That and lack of decent commenting and no support for RSS etc. was the reason I switched to Blogger.

You should check it out – Blogger, I mean – because there's a lot of places offering pretty nice downloadable templates and it's not all that hard to sort of vaguely figure out what's going on if you have even a smattering of HTML. You can always do what I do and use your Xanga page as a link to your other blog. Seems to work quite well for me.

Ross Thomas – December 10, 2004 10:09 AM

Let's fact it, HTML isn't terribly difficult. It's fussy and involves a lot of pissing around, which bugs me, but the basics are dead simple.

I'm thinking of moving to MT as well. I'm hoping to get to it over the extended Christmas break, what with the OT I'm working now.

Dean – December 11, 2004 10:24 AM

In my opinion it's totally worth it. It's a very, very cool piece of software, and there's such a ton of plugins available that I think one could spend an entire lifetime trying them all out.

One of the reasons I like it is that, being a programmer, I can extend it the way I see fit (for example, I just implemented my own version of blogrolling.com with the ability to save multiple blogrolls – my "favorite entries" list, my blogroll proper and my "groovy sites" list – and even a bookmarklet to add the current page to one of the blogrolls. I hooked it into MT so that I can only make changes to my blogrolls if I'm currently logged into MT, which saved me having to write authentication code myself. I'm absurdly pleased with it).

Anyway, I think you'll like MT. I figured there must be a reason everyone uses it...

Ross Thomas – December 11, 2004 01:01 PM