Next big thing? Not MT

The Guardian had a feature yesterday in its Online section entitled The next big thing, in which it seems to suggest that blogs are suddenly gaining visibility. Up until now, they have been “associated solely with geeks” and also at one time also teenage girls, but today, they “lie at the heart of a movement that many of its participants hope will open up previously closed processes in politics, the media, and the wider business world”.

Well, actually, blogs have been around since the very last years of the 20th century, but their surge in popularity is generally accepted to have been caused by the 11th September attacks. This is what caused the upsurge in “war blogs” (Instapundit etc) and the conversion of some of the tech blogs into war blogs (like Little Green Footballs). Blogger, for example, started in August 1999, and LiveJournal (now owned by Movable Type publisher Six Apart) was founded the same year. Given that the start date for the blogging phenomenon is generally agreed to be 1999, that gives it just six years of history.

The article mentions a corporate blog, Tinbasher, as well as BLOGthenticity, a blog about business blogging. But the only blogging technologies mentioned are those by Six Apart – Movable Type and their blog hosting service TypePad. The two blogs they actually mention are both WordPress blogs, and nothing is mentioned about how MT in particular has been haemmhoraging users since last year largely due to the overwhelming problem with spam.

I had been using MT for my blog from last summer until WordPress 1.5 was released in February 2005. While WordPress has some limitations, such as not being able to publish multiple blogs from the same installation (you can, however, publish them from different installations with the same database), huge numbers of people have found advantages in WP. WordPress is easier and quicker to set up, and it has been said that it takes up vastly less disk and database space than MT. (As for TypePad, you may find that you can get a host which supports WordPress for less than you pay for just a blog at TypePad.)

And then, spam. One of my blogging acquaintances said that she would not switch from Blogger to MT as a result of my complaints about spam; she subsequently chose WordPress. When I used MT the first thing I did, whenever I got on to a computer with internet access, was to check my blog for spam. I had to deal with it by turning off trackback, by renaming the CGI trackback script (on my host, CGI perl scripts need the file extension .cgi) – I’ve seen two blogs which have used the same tactic, apparently on a permanent basis. I tried using TypeKey authentication, but people found they couldn’t get themselves logged on. There were a few things I couldn’t do anyway without hurting my readership, such as using a picture-code or “captcha” (because visually-impaired readers can’t read it). The various anti-spam plugins I used seemed to slow down the process of republishing after an update, to the extent that “500 Internal Server Errors” became the norm rather than the exception. I accept that not every MT user had these problems, and it may have been partly my host’s fault (and my host did not appear to be familiar with MT). But it made blogging a vastly less enjoyable experience.

I’m not sure why I’ve not had a single spam since moving to WordPress. I’m not entirely convinced that WordPress is so awesomely superior to MT in fighting spam, and that it’s not just a case of there being more MT blogs around, because it has been around longer, and the spam-bots are written to detect MT blogs and know how to hit them. But MT does lack several of WP’s anti-spam features, including inbuilt two-tier word screening systems and the ability to allow or require users to sign in to comment without using the remote TypeKey system. WordPress also has the major advantage of being free, open source software for which you don’t need to pay for a commercial licence if you want to use it for your company group blog.

The Guardian knows about MT’s spam problem because, in their Onlineblog last December, they published a post about how crippling it is (MT plus comment spam equals dead site):

Blogs produced using Movable Type, including this one, are under attack from “comment spam”, with 50,000 hits a day being reported by some users. At The Daily Whim, Reid Stott writes that comment spam is “now stressing web servers so greatly that a number of hosts are shutting down comments in Movable Type, or shutting down Movable Type itself. So, if you run a weblog using Movable Type, and have comments enabled (even with MT Blacklist, as you’ll see below), you’ve got a problem. Or rather, you may be causing one at your web host, and you may get shut down with no notice.”

So then, why did they only mention MT and TypePad in their piece in the Business Solutions section yesterday? They hardly mention it on the blog at all (commercially licensed users do not need to indicate that their blogs use MT). Unless you are running several blogs and can afford the possibly prohibitive multi-user, multi-blog commercial licence, you may well be better off with WordPress at the moment.