Rodent Regatta

If you’re still listening to the noise level at Movable Type and pondering your options for a future weblogging tool, consider some criteria. First, however, you might want to read the interview with Ben and Mena Trott at IT Conversations. You’ll get some sense of what they expected with the announcement of their licensing revisions and price sheet.

As for criteria, here are some of mine:

• Learn and build knowledge around one tool
• Stick with a tool that will ”be there”
• Make sure the tool will be enhanced over time
• Understand the annual cost to stay current
• Know that developers want to add to it
• Deal with comment spam
• Allow editing of multiple weblogs from a single console
• It should encourage standards-based design
• Underlying technologies include MySQL and PHP *
• Know where support will come from
• Some portion of the blogging elite adopt it
• Avoid a tool dependent on ”one man’s genius”

• After reading so much about the Movable Type licensing and those who propose alternatives to it, I discovered a term I hadn’t heard before – the LAMP environment. It stands for Linux + Apache + MySQL + PHP (or Perl or Python).