Rodent Regatta

I have a personal weblog, the one you’re reading now. I’m working on a business blogsite for my company. It isn’t complete, yet. I had previously assisted someone else who was starting a new venture by using my copy of Movable Type to help him get a web site going. That has been abandoned. That’s how I use MT 2.661 today. I’d love to expand that usage in the future.

In order to support two weblogs, prepare for the future and to get support from designers and developers who need to be authors on any of the sites I create, I’ve got to have an MT 3.0 commercial license with more than five authors. If I were more knowledgeable, I’d do a lot of the work myself and I wouldn’t have to have so many authors. I’m the only one (initially) who will be posting to either of these sites, but I know from time to time I’ll be calling for help from others. My only choices are the $199 plan or the $599 plan. The $199 plan doesn’t leave much room for growth or expansion, new sites or new authors.

Imagine a world in which you buy Microsoft Excel based upon how many spreadsheets you’ve already created and how many you expect to create in the future. Beyond the usual Microsoft-bashing that would go on, reasonable people would be baffled about how to determine their price. Add to that the limited visibility about how new features added to the product might change your pricing in the future and you’re left to guess at whether your $600 fee is an annual figure, a one-time event or something else.

I really like Movable Type and the people I’ve come in contact with as I’ve tried to learn HTML, XHTML, MT, CSS, etc. I don’t want to ”sacrifice” that learning curve. I’d simply like to know that I could allow a ”temporary” author to log in, install some markup, scripts and plugins and logout. Deleting that author, though they might have been #6 for a couple of days, shouldn’t place me in violation of the 5×5 commercial license!

I need one of those 1000-nails-a-month hammers, even if somebody else is driving the nails! [Big-teethy-grin-smiley goes here!]