Is a Weblog a Gadget ?

15 April 2004 by martin

Well it may as well be with all the effort I've put into to getting something I actually like. I've spent a fair amount of time looking at other peoples 'blogs, searching the web and trying out different systems. I even considered building my own, but in this day and age that would be stupid.

The features I really wanted in order of importance :
* Ability to integrate into my existing web site
* Spell checker
* Comments
* Search
* RSS

First I tried Blogger :
+ nice and simple UI,
+ free hosted service,
+ ability to publish via ftp to my own web site.
+ included a spell checker
- no reader commenting
- no search
- no RSS, just Atom

Next Nucleus :
+ developed in PHP (cool) and MySQL
+ very very customisable
+ search and reader commenting
+ loads and loads of plug-ins
+ every flavour of RSS ever conceived
- no spell checker
- templates way too complicated
- very very very slow (which I am sure is my ISPs fault)

Lastly Movable Type :
+ developed in Perl and MySQL
+ simple to customise
+ search and comments
+ simple to use
+ very fast
+ loads of plug ins
- no spell checker

So which did I go for ? Movable Type scored only one negative - no spellcheckcer. Looks like you'll just have to put up with the ocasionl speling mistoke. It's really easy to use and I really like it, although I did have a few problems with the install. It didn't help that I accidentally ran the initial load script twice or that I put the wrong domain name in the config file - and I'm supposed to be a professional! Biggest problem I had was trying to log in first time. It just wouldn't accept the default system generated username and password. A couple of minutes on the excellent MT Forums pointed to it being caused by cookies. I cleared my cookies in IE and then it worked first time. I haven't yet intergrated it with my site but that looks like it will be a doddle.

Thanks to Mark Rittman whose blog I have been reading and without whom I would not have discovered Movable Type.