Rodent Regatta

In three different places I’ve read of performance problems with Movable Type 3.0. I’m wishing I had noted the three sites. I didn’t.

Can someone who is using MT 3.0 tell me whether or not these reports are unique to specific people and problems, or is there some performance flaw in the ”new MT?”

Some communication difficulty is tolerable. Some new pricing arrangements are tolerable. Adding a performance problem on top of those is intolerable.

• * * UPDATE * * * Performance must be improved with MT 3.0. Via a comment, Steven Vore pointed me to Jeremy’s site, and he speaks of a much-improved rebuild time.

After editorializing a bit about the announcement by Movable Type, it’s time to make some decisions in the next week or two. I’ve just spent about $1000 having some design work done on an upcoming commercial site. Coupled with the site you are reading and one other, I’m faced with three choices:

• Stay with MT 2.661 for $150 (I assume the old commercial license is still available for the old version)
• Upgrade to commercial MT 3.0 for $600 (I need more than 5 authors)
• Pay someone to help me migrate to another (open source/free) tool

These are not appetizing alternatives.

Look at this quote:

if youre going to learn about MySQL or PHP, especially if you want to learn about both, grab any one of the many freely available open source applications, install it, and then learn by tweaking.

Shelley Powers
Burning Bird
Survival Guide to LAMP: Taught By Tweak

When I started writing this weblog in January of 2002, that was my theory. I thought I could learn HTML and later XHTML and CSS just by doing. I’ve learned a lot, but I’m no where close to where I ought to be. I’ve had many, many (costly) false starts.

I’ve read books that spend the better part of 150 pages telling you ”how web design has always been done,” only to hit you with CSS and XHTML on page 151. Why learn all the bad (tables) habits if they are no longer the preferred way to do things? Why learn upper case tags if XHTML insists they be lower case?

I’m not much closer to a proper way to learn all this stuff. However, I’m’ confident that if you can identify the tools you want to learn, then find someone who really knows those tools and can teach you without overemphasizing ”the way we use to do it,” you’ll be better off.

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).

A list of feature considerations for weblog software. We’ll consider PHP, MySQL, plugins, native functionality, current price, future prices, support, etc.

Stay tuned, and goodnight!