I guess I should clarify something I didn’t bother to mention here earlier. In the beginning, Mike and I had discussion on Blogger vs non-Blogger systems. There is a whole load of personal issues that he mentioned on his own blog (relating to his job and the specific purpose of it) that factored in to the discussion. His whole point was that a technical person can use a centralized service like Blogger because it works for them. In part, that was in response to my “You’re a techno-geek! Why don’t you use something you can hack and tweak?” questioning of him. I wasn’t the first person to ask him that, so he responded to the pros & cons of both. I agreed too – Blogger serves a great purpose and there are lots of other techno-types that use it too.

So here is my long babbling post summarizing everything – and I think that we should all have a group hug at the end, don’t you?

I took our whole discussion and ran with it here on my blog after he said that others had made the “herd” comment. Again, there is a big picture here – they had seen many jump to MT because “it’s the latest cool thing to try”. Understandable. My response though was that to go with MT or any other self-contained system, you have to be willing to dedicate yourself to it – it takes money for hosting, etc. It also takes time to learn something new, and there are people who walk away from it because they just can’t figure it out. (On the other hand, I had a Blogger template moved in to an MT template in about 10 minutes last night, and it would have been faster if a div tag hadn’t been giving me problems.)

The key thing here is that after talking, he apologized. He realized that the “herd” comment wasn’t appropriate and he saw my point of view. I apologized too, I didn’t mean to make him feel attacked in our private discussions when I questioned his blog software choice. (He really is super smart to the point of constantly amazing me…) We agreed on points that we both had made – I think Blogger serves a great purpose, and look at how many people use it daily. All was good and well.

Ciscley brought up how women are more willing to move on to a new software – they don’t have hang ups about it. Men like it once they move. Manda mentioned that there are some people out there that might see us MT users as “clique-ish” and while I can see their point, I should also point out that I don’t even notice what blog software people are using until I try to leave them a comment. I don’t look over at a sidebar and go “ooooh… they are using (insert name here) so this blog isn’t good enough to read.” The writing of a blog means EVERYTHING to me, and I have linked to people using all sorts of software.

Jonathon & Shelley brought up an interesting question – is MT the ultimate blogging software because men and women love it? Have Ben & Mena struck gold? I think they have. You can decide for yourself.

But when I read Carla’s post, I realized that maybe … just maybe … I needed to clarify all of this for everyone. I don’t want anyone to think that Mike EVER said anything about MT not being good enough because “of a girl’s role in it’s development”. Far from the case. He said all along that MT is great and he has planned for some time (I first heard about it in September, so at least 2 months) to use MT for his cooking blog. It wasn’t until his YACCS comments in his main blog started freaking out that this ever came up. That and the techno factor. Then I pointed out that I also had my selfish reasons for wanting him on MT – so he could write code for me too!

So we’ve made peace. And the discussion has been truly interesting. But please realize that peace has been made, apologies exchanged (if you want to call them that) and things clarified. The initial question was “what do you use and why do you use it?” The only gender question that ever came up was one of wondering if more men used it then women or vice-versa…

So now it’s time for a big group hug! Can we all kiss and make up?