Here are five reason why blogging software Movable Type is broken:
- Its anti-spam support is dreadful. Yes, there are better anti-spam features in the current version than in prior version. That, however, is like saying the prior version leaked like a sieve, while the current version only leaks like hundred-year-old house. I mean, c’mon: Why is there no easy to way to learn from incoming spam and incorporate it into new anti-spam rules? Yeesh.
- Three words: No visual editor. This is 2005, folks. I had a visual editor in GrokSoup back in 1999. Unbelievable omission, and truly newbie alienating.
- No built-in support for comment-based RSS feeds. The second most important part of blogs is the conversations that build up around posts, and yet there is no easy out-of-the-box way to straightforwardly allow people to subscribe to new comments. Deep down inside, Movable Type just doesn’t care.
- It’s too hard to add in advertising/merchandising support. SixApart should have made it drop-dead easy for people to add in Google Adsense or equivalent, plus whatever else they want to do. Instead you have to code it in by hand. That’s like the owner of some supposedly turnkey commercial real estate telling you that the property isn’t plumbed or wired, but you should feel free to do it yourself.
- One word: Typepad.
So, why hasn’t someone else arrived to take this market away? Commercial blogging and personal blogging are still wide open, with a still small installed base, and no rational person having deep allegiance to Movable Type. It’s time.
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You should give wordpress.com a try, Paul. I haven’t used the Web-based version, but I use the server-based one and it’s quite good. Hey, if it’s good enough for the Scobleizer…
I have to agree with WordPress. The installed version is more akin to Moveable Type. And like MT was at the beginning, it’s free and easily configurable. Also like early MT, it has a following of developers who write plugins.
That’s why, I would guess, nobody is making an impact (or trying?) with new blog software.
Hear, hear. I hate MT too, but I’m still using it.
What about blogger.com? It has a nice visual editor, and AdSense integration (of course.) For all it’s niceties, however, I prefer to have total control over installed software and my database of posts, even as rare and small as they are.
(I added a fancy WYSIWYG plugin to MT, and it
“mostly” worked. Where “mostly” means just poorly enough to drive me completely insane and make me do a clean install of MT.)
Typepad is also a Sixapart product…
yep, we’re doing commercial blogging
but it’s about solving a different problem to that which MT solved.
commercial blogging isn’t about how easily or well you can publish content. it’s how easily and well you can get traffic on that content and convert your prospects to close online transactions.
we think we’ve got some solutions to that “how do I get more sales?” prblem and we’ve got some tricks up our sleeves
hell…we’ll see how it goes
MT’s anti-spam is worse that that: it does learn, but it learns poorly. Comment spammers have already learned that you can produce “harmless” comments that make you known to MT, and then throw in dozens of URLs, because your email address is now “known good.” Best of all, you can do this over the course of just a few seconds.
Bloody spamatuers.
Hi Paul,
Thanks for the feedback. I think I’ve got some good answers to a lot of the points you’ve raised.
Spam: What would you define as good anti-spam protection? Currently, an out-of-the-box setup of MT with no configuration doesn’t allow spam comments to appear on your site, and what I’ve heard from our users is this is still overwhelmingly effective — is that not the case for you?
Comment authentication (either optional or required) can be set up with two clicks. And the known junk items automatically get deleted without you having to touch anything. Plus you’re not getting emails about all the comments to approve, which would just move the spam from your blog to your email inbox.
WYSIWYG: I agree, this should be built in. There’s been a few reasons (which I offer as explanation, not excuse) for why this hasn’t been in the core of the platform yet. The first is that it’s long been a plugin, and in the past people had a strong preference for different technologies — there just weren’t any good ways to do a WYSIWYG editor that would generate output that displayed consistently in non-IE browsers. In short, we could have bundled an editor in the past, but it would have meant some percentage of your blog’s readers saying “it doesn’t look right sometimes in firefox!”. We’re finally on the cusp of that no longer being true.
Comment RSS Feeds: We have a template for this which has been available for 4 years (yes, you read that right) but we hadn’t included it in the past because most of our professional users tell us their audiences barely understand RSS at all, let alone that a single page could have multiple feeds, depending on what kind of content you want to subscribe to. As awareness of these technologies spreads, we’re bringing more of these things into the core, but we’ve always focused on making essential tasks automatic and less common use cases easily possible, which is where this stands today. Based on your feedback, I think we’ll definitely consider moving comment feeds into the default distribution, without complicating the feed subscription process for average readers.
Ad support: Yep, it’s too hard. We’re working on this right now to improve the plugins for all the popular ad networks so that it’s point-and-click easy. Right now it’s too hard on every platform, requiring third-party plugins that just aren’t professional grade. I think we’ll be the first to really fix that problem.
TypePad: Not sure how this is a problem. I think this demonstrates that, as a company, Six Apart can do a good job of building a visual editor, that we can make ad revenues checkbox-simple to add, and that we’re committed to making solutions that fit a wide variety of needs. If you’ve got feedback on how we can improve that, please let me know.
And I think one way that MT is not broken, especially compared to all your other options, is that we have paid support and a company you can hold accountable if you have any questions or concerns. I’d ask you to measure our progress against the items I’ve listed here in a week, in a month, and in 6 months, and I’m confident you’ll be more satisfied with MT than you would be with any other platform.
If you’ve got any other questions, feel free to email or call me at 646-541-5843 any time.