Which blogware to use?

As a lot of you noticed, I recently switched my blog tool back to Movable Type. With a vengeance – I actually bought an unlimited personal licence while it was reduced for a few months in the wake of the 3.2 release. A lot of people didn’t like this. “MT sucks!”, they said. In the last few years, bloggers have switched from earlier versions of MT to Wordpress (and probably other tools) to flee the advancing tide of comment and trackback spam. Wordpress offered at the time what no other blogging tool did: the two-level word-blocking system. It kept out most of the spam I got. MT had a Blacklist plug-in tool which I used, but suspected was slowing my system down and causing server errors. When Wordpress 1.5 came out, I went for it like a shot.

Others, some of whom had been using MT and some who had refused to use MT because of the spam problem, took up Wordpress as well: Umm Zaid, Yursil, Bin Gregory, and Safiyyah to name the four I can think of. MT just wasn’t cutting it. Its trackback facility was rendered next to useless by the spam, which was immensely frustrating as it’s a very useful tool. (Wordpress also offered pingback, a system by which a ping would be sent to any post on a pingback-supporting system linked in your entry, and a short extract would be displayed at their site. MT still hasn’t implemented this (perhaps they don’t intend to).

So, what is it that drew me back to MT? One of the biggest draws was the clean look of the blogs. Someone recently commented on this blog that MT sites all look alike and aren’t as diverse as Wordpress blogs are. That may be true, but that may be because MT has a distinct identity. You can override that identity and stamp your own on your own site, if you have both the imagination and the technical skill to do so, but if I have a MT blog, it’s quite acceptable that it has a MT identity. MT has recently introduced a new stylesheet standard which introduces consistency across themes and better enables the users to simply slot in a stylesheet; they also have a range of styles on offer. It’s fair to say, though, that the massive library of styles which has appeared for WP 1.5 doesn’t exist in the MT world, and the StyleCatcher plug-in which (once installed) allows the quick download of these styles has been criticised for being difficult to install for beginners. It’s no substitute for TypePad’s template builder.

In my experience, Wordpress themes, like blog themes generally, have a tendency to be either funky or feminine, and a lot of bloggers want neither (particularly the latter!). (And as for femininity, the TypePad user interface, with all those pastel colours, is as feminine as it gets. On an occasion where I helped a new user set up their blog, I got the distinct impression on seeing the design that I was in a woman’s private space, which I was, but it looks the if the author is a man.) They are often too ornate and graphic-intensive; even the standard Wordpress theme depends on graphics rather than just CSS. A couple of years ago, I was at a family wedding party, and I couldn’t help noticing that a close relative was wearing a rather nice dress. I noticed a while later that another guest had a dress of the exact same type, a fact I pointed out to my mother who told me that I absolutely shouldn’t mention it to either of them. Nobody wants to be at a party wearing the same dress as someone else, and that’s how I feel about blog themes. I don’t mind if my blog bears the stamp of the blog software author; I do mind having an ornate theme which is manifestly not mine, which the next blog you read after mine might also bear.

And there just isn’t a characteristic Wordpress look. There are a dire shortage of easily customisable Wordpress themes, and the default theme relies heavily on graphics which also can’t easily be customised. Some of these themes also do not bring out the full functionality of Wordpress, but rather, only what was convenient for the designer’s own blog. Neither system, unlike TypePad, comes with a theme editor, and I’ve not seen a plug-in for either MT or Wordpress which replicates its functionality.

To replicate this on Wordpress would mean one of three things: either writing an entire CSS stylesheet to the database, or writing individual colour and font details to it (which would mean making vast numbers of database queries every time you loaded any blog page), or writing it to a file, which would mean making the file writeable to anyone who happened to have access to your system – something I’m obviously unwilling to do, because anyone could get an account with my host (actually they couldn’t as things stand, because my account type is no longer available to new customers) and use it to interfere with my blog. (If your host happens to be your college or employer, it’s a different story altogether.) Perl, on which Movable Type is based, has methods to allow a web server to write to the file space without changing the file permissions to allow anyone logged in to do the same; I’m not sure if PHP has the same, but if it does, Wordpress doesn’t make use of it. I like the abillity MT gives you to edit your stylesheet without either opening up your filespace to your host’s other customers, or logging in and using the “vi” editor.

There’s also the multiple blog issue. Anil Dash of Six Apart, in a comment here in August, remarked that with MT, unlike Wordpress, you “can manage all of your blogs in one place, with one simple set of user interfaces”. Multiple blogs do not seem to be on the horizon with Wordpress, although you can manage several blogs from one database by installing the software several times and varying a prefix for your database tables. Wordpress has, however, the advantage of its open-source status; for some people, the inconvienience of multiple installations (which take five minutes or less) is preferable to the cost of a MT licence.

Wordpress has some technical advantages. An important advantage is its quick PHP publishing, which cuts out the rebuild errors which blighted my experience of publishing a static MT blog. This is something Six Apart got round to implementing in MT only on version 3.1 – with a vengeance, unlike Wordpress offering flexible dynamic publishing by which you can publish some pages dynamically and some statically (which I do), or all dynamic, or all static. TypePad is still static, which gave me great surprise when I briefly used it earlier this year, and Wordpress, of course, is all-PHP and 100% dynamic. On the other hand, there’s the niggling problems, like the sometimes over-zealous spam protection system, which may trap the authors’ own comments, and the lack of a facility to let your commenters choose whether to have their personal data remembered. I hacked this into the version I ran, and one reader discovered she couldn’t then forget or change her details.

I’m pretty sure that there’s room for both in the blogosphere. I find MT very convenient for editing three blogs. I like the look, with two out of my three blogs having a standard MT layout with a colour scheme supplied by me (in the case of this blog, adapted from my old Wordpress theme, Almost Spring by Becca Wei); anyone who reads a lot of MT or TypePad blogs will feel at home in mine. I’m not sure I’d say to everyone currently using Wordpress, “go and switch to MT”, as Wordpress works for a lot of people who, I suspect, will not be able to manage the migration. But anyone starting a blog now has nothing to fear from using MT. It works for me.