Readers may have noticed that I’ve installed a “donate” button in one of the side bars on the right. Until recently I’ve been able to just about make this blog, and the other two sites on this domain, just about pay their way by advertising, but since 2008 revenues have dropped very sharply, often to around £5 or less per month. I still use Google ads, and I intend that they’ll be back on here once I’ve adjusted this new theme to accommodate them. As you may have read in my previous post, work has not been easy to come by, either.

The problem is, I don’t know right now how I’ll pay for the hosting bill in just under a month’s time, which usually comes in at about £60 ($90-100 US). I definitely do need to pay it as I also use the package for my email.

So, no pressure, but … I’ve put a PayPal donation box up (they accept the usual credit/debit cards) and any contribution would be gratefully received.

I have had two minor problems. The first was that the customisations I had made to my theme stopped working and the image I was using stopped appearing. However, I soon found that the new version has a new way of accessing theme variables, and I made a small change and everything worked again. The second is that the auto-upgrade system has stopped working, but that only means I that if I have plugins which need upgrading, I have to do it “the hard way” by downloading them to my hard drive and uploading them to my website; previously, WordPress itself would download it and extract it. A minor annoyance and one I expect will be fixed fairly soon.

Why did I switch back, then? The main reason is that MT actually lacks a lot of things which come as standard with WordPress (and, for that matter, other blogging systems), or come as free add-ons. The biggest thing it lacks is a link manager. There was a blogroll plugin for MT 3, but it never became compatible with MT 4, and the replacement “Link Roller” did not have proper categories, replacing them with tags. I ended up keeping the output of my last MT 3 blogroll and editing the HTML by hand using the template editor when I needed to add or remove a link. Now, that’s all changed thanks to WordPress’s built-in link manager.

Also, a lot of add-ons for MT have to be paid for. MT only became open-source when version 4 came out (and the version I use isn’t), and even trivial add-ons are “donationware” or shareware. One example is the Twitter plugin; most software which handles Twitter interaction is free, but the culture of MT is still the shareware culture (i.e. try before you buy, but it still costs), and I can’t afford to shell out for a Twitter plugin.

The other reason is MT’s flaky behaviour when dealing with desktop blogging clients. I use QTM to post most of my entries (not including this one!), but MT sometimes posts it straight to the site and sometimes just “schedules” it, and sometimes posts it with categories and sometimes doesn’t, and I couldn’t find any consistent pattern to it; I only found out whether it had been posted correctly by checking the entries listing on the admin panel. WordPress has also brought in an improved desktop client interface, which is an important incentive if you’re the developer of a desktop client.

There are a few disadvantages to using WordPress; one is that it’s less flexible about sidebars. On MT, you can choose which combination of sidebar “widgets” to use on each type of page, so my front page had no ads but my archive pages did, and my archive pages didn’t have a blogroll; that was only on the front page. You can’t do that on this version of WP, although you can suppress the sidebars altogether. Another is that it only supports dynamic publishing; MT allowed to you pre-generate all or part of your site (however, there is a cache plugin, which I intend to investigate). WordPress also does not seem to have a standard template, and the custom themes you can get do generate rather untidy code, which makes debugging and customising more difficult (it hasn’t stopped me, though). I found that the MT export code exported my categories but not the hierarchy, which left me wondering why my hierarchy didn’t show up despite having configured WP to show it (I had to re-order them by hand). It didn’t export my pages, either, only my actual blog entries.

However, WordPress is the most popular personal blogging application and, as a result, has a thriving support network and plugin scene, while MT does seem stuck in the early 2000s. That is the biggest reason to use it rather than MT.