i am dustin diaz

Movable Type versus Wordpress

MovableType and Wordpress seem to have hit the Pepsi / Coke — Yahoo / Google wall. The two are equally strong in different areas. As of late, I've been real frustrated with movableType's spam tools. Every monday I can count on logging into my control panel and deleting about 25 trackbacks and comments that were automated from some face-hole on the other side of the planet with nothing to live for. Sure, it only takes a couple of minutes to delete; add a few extra minutes for a slow server (crappy hosting), add even a couple more minutes for a slow connection; the time adds up over the course of the year. Overall I think I've wasted a full day of my online blogging experience just deleting spam. This is where, in fact, I think Wordpress is superior. Don't bother telling me about movableType's new anti-spam tools; I'm already using all of them. One thing I would like to duly note about movableType is that my favorite developer blog is also the author of SAMs Teach yourself Movable Type in 24 Hours by Molly Holzschlag, who in fact, is using Wordpress herself. Yea, I'm sure she's got crap for it all, but it does say something about the product. As some of you know, I purchased Movable Type near the end of last year (like the good samaritan I am), right before the big Wordpress update. Am I bummed? Sure. I fell victim to design. MT just had a better one. Wordpress on the other hand, didn't. Thinking back on it, however, I was up late one night when I made the decision. One should never choose one software over the other based soley on the look of it. I basically got the impression that the classier the UI, the better the functionality must be. Surely a first class design means first class development tools. Wrong.

The Wordpress update

I'm talking about their new default theme. Yes I know I'm still talking about design, but look at the engineering here. As soon as you hit your shortcut key to disable styles, it was all over: Wordpress won my heart. I can just remember how much of a pain in the ass it was to manipulate the default Movable Type theme in a ZenGarden'esk' fashion. There was nothing to hook that was helpful for a CSS redesign. The standards in Wordpress are just so much better.

Corporate Whordeom

It sucks when a solid piece of software gets bought out. In this case, Six Apart. Aside from that, you go to the SixApart website, and yes, I would consider myself a pretty-intelligent web-savvy up-to-date kinda-guy, and I have no idea what the hell they're selling over there! Seriously, right now SixApart is advertising folks to get a Baby Blog. First thing that comes to mind:

PC Loadletter, what tha f**k does that mean?

Ok, so what does baby blog mean? It means TypePad. Oh, well then why didn't you just say typePad. Oh but there's two more blog softwares. Let's not forget about Live Journal. Yea, that cheap piece of crap software closing in on ten million accounts. Pshh. Yea. Right. So LiveJournal, TypePad, and Movable Type. You go, you... guys.

Enough Bashing, so am I getting Wordpress?

Most likely, no. And as much as I am an advocate for developers who want to blog to just get a third party cms and not make their own... I will be attempting to make my own. I say this because it's in every developers nature to go feature-crazy. In almost all cases a developer will never finish their own cms. This includes everything from revamping the data structure to minor UI adjustments. Plus, for what I want to do with the future of this website will be much different and unique than what any cms will have to offer. My guess is that by mid september I'll have my own Dustin Diaz relaunch (version ten dot six). Until that time comes, I will continue on with my spam woes as if I were breathing in second hand smoke from my blog provider. <!-- edit -->

By the way, I just upgraded this blog to Wordpress for the time being because I realized how much of my life I really did just waste on deleting spam.