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Fooljay from the MT support boards has tons of cool things on his site at Openwire – OPP Tool Talk. I just sent of my “I’ll beta test!” e-mail for the search feature. Even if no one else uses it, I use it to find things I have “bookmarked” here – I don’t use regular bookmarks in my browser, I write about it here and that way I can search for it easily. It is the one thing I have missed since I transitioned from Greymatter.

In case you have the “which is better for me, MT or GM?” question, here are some reasons I love MT:
– I can post to any of my MT blogs from one bookmarklet, making it easier to update on the fly.
– One MT interface for all blogs – so I can go to one central location to maintain this site, Worth Keeping and I am a Betty Crocker Wannabe.
– One MT interface means only one install of MT on my server, leaving more free space. (All of my domains are hosted in one giant account.)
– MT does not take FOREVER to rebuild when I make a change to my templates. Even if I rebuild all of them including my 700 individual entries, my weekly archives and my monthly archives.
– MT easily imported all of my GM entries.
– MT is still in development by the original creators. Not a group of people making hacks for it, but actual growing & changing software.
– I like the pretty interface. (It looks a lot like the MT website)
– I can easily “export” all of my entries so I can keep a back up. I do this about once a week, sometimes twice – just in case I lose the server or something.
– All the cool people use MT. (Ok, not really – but I had to see if you were paying attention!)
– Categories. I don’t use the for this site, but I am about to add them to the recipe site, and I think they would be handy for the “Worth Keeping” site too. I am going to post more entries first so I can see what categories I need to add.

Hmmm… I think that pretty much covers it. If you have any questions feel free to let me know. Hey Candi, no one has asked for my help yet – is that a sign?

By Christine

Christine is an Avenger of Sexiness. Her Superpower is helping Hot Mamas grow their Confidence by rediscovering their Beauty. She lives in the Heights in Houston, Texas, works as a boudoir photographer, and writes about running a Business of Awesome. In her spare time, she loves to knit, especially when she travels. She & her husband Mike have a food blog at Spoon & Knife.

7 replies on “More on MovableType”

I agree with you SO much! I’m gonna sign up for the search engine, too – because I do the same thing with my favorite new links.

In addition to everything you mentioned (including the thing about the cool people 😉 ), I really like the template system. I can use MT includes for headers and set up as many pages as I want to to be powered by MT – every page on theredkitchen is made with MT – all the profiles, the category pages, the book listings – and many of them are dynamic and automatically updating.

The categories are PERFECT for theredkitchen, and I’ll be using it more on my site, too.

There’s a few things I miss – like the search engine, and the easily done links (ctrl+alt+A used to be my best friend while posting, and **bolding** was way easy, too), but since MT is still in development, I have hope for having it be the PERFECT tool! 🙂

If you ever do get too many people to help out by yourself, you know where I am to help out too 🙂 Maybe we can write a book about it 😉

(uh oh, I just wrote a book in your comments! mucho sorrio!)

Heh heh, I’ve just made the move to MT. Actually, I’ve only used GM for a week or two anyhow. I don’t have MT *quite* ready for “live” yet, but I will in a day or two. Thanks for your thoughts on the pros/cons. 🙂

I found out about MT at Mena’s site, DollarShort. I bookmarked it just after they announced that they would be releasing it in the future, then I watched & waited for the release. Then I decided to wait to see what others thought of it, since I knew Kristine, Zalary, Dawn and others were playing with it. Naomi & I discussed it when I was having all sorts of problems with my host, CGI, and my site using GM was too big to run on other hosts like Aletia. She also brought up the good point when I said I was sticking with GM that MT is still in development. When Todd & Robyn told me what they liked about it, that had me almost sold, but I still waited for 1.2 to come out to install. Just have to be cautious when dealing with 500 or so entries (at the time). Now it’s over 725, and MT handles them all much better than GM was. If I had to do a rebuild in GM right now, I would be sitting here holding my breath through every second of it, terrified it would crash. Not an issue with MT.

You just wait! *wicked laugh* When people ask me for help, from now on I’m sending them to you. Or maybe I’ll post on my site, “I’m no longer giving out handouts. ASK CHRISTINE!”

LOL

The most important part of MT (IMHO) is that if for some reason the rebuilding of your files fails….you can just rebuild again. In GreyMatter one failed rebuild and you had to restore a backup of the blog to get it working again.

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