Don’t you just hate it when you start to write a full post about something, then you change your mind, but you forget to change the title of the post? Well, that’s what I did last night. I was a little distracted since Naomi was over to visit me and we were having so much fun laughing about the craziest things – but more about that later today.
Now, about this “Big Debate”. You see, Mike is having this huge moral dilemna over which blog software to use. This caused a huge debate yesterday about what types of systems are really the best. On top of that, I got very annoyed when he said that switching to MT would mean “being a part of the herd. Baaaah. Moooo.” (Note my reference to “Go be part of the herd” at the end of my earlier post.)
I don’t believe that using MT means you are following the herd. Heck, in order to use MT you have to make a substantial commitment to blogging in my opinion. You need a host or server that can handle running the software. This involves a monetary commitment. You need to be able to install the software, find a friend to help you out, or pay someone to install it for you.
Blogger still holds a HUGE corner of the blog world market. But from where I stand it’s a lot like AOL. Most people use it initially because it’s easy to use. As Mike pointed out, it does everything he needs to run his site – and I agree with him. Matter of fact, I think Blogger is a wonderful service for many reasons. It doesn’t require the same commitments that MT does – namely money. You can blog using Blogger for free, and that’s a really good thing. Anyone can set up a blog using it, which is wonderful – but from where I stand that causes more of a herd than the MT users ever will be.
Personally, I used Blogger first. By May, 2000 they were having a lot of server down time. I wanted to be able to blog when the mood hit me, not when Blogger would let me log on, so I switched to Greymatter. I wanted the control of everything running on my own server. Once I hit the point of about 500 posts, Greymatter couldn’t handle my rebuilds on my host at the time and MT was released – so moving was a natural choice. Since then there have been others to come on to the scene – namely pMachine – that I would love to try out, but I am similar to Mike in a lot of ways, and my site isn’t broke so I don’t want to move to a new system and I am very loyal to Ben & Mena for all of their hard work on MT over the past year. As much as I’ve supported them, they have been supportive of me and Blogomania too. In addition to that, I have friends that develop & share cool things I can do in MT. (Blogger would never be able to fit my needs for gadgets, hacks & tweaks.)
I should toss in here that Mike & I made peace over the whole debate yesterday and it ended up just being just amusing that it was a debate to begin with. Now if only he had TrackBack, I would ping his post with this post to continue the discussion…
So now I’m curious to hear what others have to say about the Big Debate. What have you used for your blog if you have one? What do you like about it? Are there pros and cons to other systems that you want to share? Do you have anything to say on it? If you don’t have a blog and you were just starting out – what would you use?