I have migrated this site from Greymatter to Movable Type 2.0. Reasons:
- Greymatter doesn’t scale well. I had just over 200 entries, and rebuilding all entries (for instance, when adding a sidebar link) took minutes. In Movable Type, it takes seconds.
- Easy importing of my old Greymatter entries.
- Easy exporting of all my Movable Type entries, in case I decide to move to yet another system later.
- I wrote a short script (which I will post after I get some sleep) which exports all my old posts from diveintomark.weblogger.com, and I imported them into Movable Type. Result: completely integrated archives of my old Manila weblog, my old Greymatter weblog, and my new Movable Type weblog. The old Greymatter entries will remain, to preserve others’ links.
- Categories. Must play with categories this weekend.
Why not move to Radio?
- Restrictive license. I can only use Radio on one computer. I use 3 computers on a regular basis, and that’s when I’m working at home! Even if I stretch the definition to mean “one computer at a time”, I’m on the road 20 weeks a year doing onsite training, I can never get good Internet access in hotels, and life is hectic enough without installing client software on new lab machines every other week. (Movable Type, like Greymatter and Blogger, can be accessed from any web browser.)
- Difficulty using CSS stylesheets, especially multiple CSS stylesheets. Joe got it working, but the design of the software works against you. (Specifically, it encourages putting all CSS/Javascript/HTML in a single lump, which negates most of the benefits of CSS, since it requires a complete rebuild/republish to change any CSS attribute.)
- Non-XHTML compliance. Movable Type is XHTML-compliant out of the box. In fact, the default template included with Movable Type is XHTML Transitional. (I’m using a migrated version of my old Greymatter templates, which are XHTML Strict. This is impossible in Radio because of its non-compliant calendar code, and its unconfigurable tendency to insert unmatched P tags everywhere.)
- Don’t care about news aggregation, and even if I did, there are Free Software alternatives (AmphetaDesk) which are better anyway. And by “better”, I mean “faster” and “less buggy“.
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