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!]

Scriptygoddess has provided some more detail about the way she uses Movable Type and why the new licensing arrangement really doesn’t fit her current uses of the product. However, if you read carefully, you’ll find that she is also calling into question the feature set that (isn’t in MT 3.0) and hasn’t been announced for the future.

I’m still on the fence. I’m not sure I can learn a new tool quickly enough to keep some things I’m doing at a functional level. By the same token, I’m disappointed that work done to date is now going to cost $600 on top of design and support fees I’ve been paying to others.

Are these minor amounts of money that most people are fussing about? Yes. the problem comes with having no visibility into what MT 3.1 might cost, when there might be some new features and how quickly WordPress can get the product ready for truly (novice) users like me.

In my next entry, I’ll restate my own approach to using Movable Type.

Some of you read my entry about needing to spend $600 to stay on Movable Type and sent emails. I’ve learned that the templates on my weblogs may have to be altered to run MT 3.0, but I can’t find out where, how or why.

That lack of knowledge spells ”more money.” Someone who knows the issues associated with upgrading to MT 3.0 will have to be paid to migrate my sites. That means the cost is in excess of $600. It raises the question of how far $600 might take me in trying to move my sites and their designs over to WordPress.

Eric Meyer seemed to have little trouble moving from his ”home-grown” solution to WordPress. Trust me, I’m no Eric Meyer! So, what’s this really going to cost?

Pay to upgrade to MT 3.0: license fee + design assistance = $ x
Pay to move to WordPress: $0 license fee + design assistance = $ y

In an entry titled To Let we get the inside scoop as to why Movable Style will be taken over by a willing party or expire.

Today I stumbled into Bloxsom and GeekNewz.

Then, tonight, I see that Jeffrey Veen points to Whisper for quiet content management.

The not-so-quiet part of the web can be seen in The Three Scourges.

My weekend of browsing and all the discussion of the Movable Type announcement clarified some things. I learned of the LAMP acronym. I like the notion of using tools that are open and widely known. The challenge of really learning PHP, MySQL, Apache and Linux is (at least) intellectually intriguing, if not particularly practical for someone like me. Though those are key web technologies, is it reasonable to think they can be learned late in life? We’ll see.