Commentary,  Software

Moving to MoveableType

June 30, 2003 /

Write Note Pads: High-quality affordable notebooks, memo pads, and planners.

No, I’ve not quit blogging about Instructional Technology, I’ve just been distracted with one thing and another.

  • I’ve returned to technical editing; one of the books I worked on, Dennis Cohen and Bob Levitus’ excellent
    iLife Bible    , is out.
  • I’ve been teaching, first composition, and now, English 10A, English Medieval and Renaissance literature, 800-1660. That’s a fair amount of blogging time right there.
  • Finally, I realized that I really don’t want to keep using Radio Userland.

Radio is just too awkward, clumsy, and crude. It has almost no real documentation, certainly not the sort you’d expect from a commercial product, it frequently fails to perform various tasks related to server communication with Userland, it’s unbelievably slow, it has an astonishingly poor interface, and Raido doesn’t even attempt to follow the basic HIG guidelines from Apple, or intelligent web interface design. Since I serve from my own domain, Radio really isn’t worth another $40.00 renewal fee, particularly since the support is non-existent. Userland hasn’t fixed long term bugs, and promised features from a year ago are still not implemented.

Given the elegant interfaces possible with Apple’s Cocoa tools (take a look at Nisus Writer Express, or Brent Simmons NetNewsWire, or even the somewhat quirky Mac OS X-only iBlog), I see no reason to stick with Radio. Indeed, the new Blogger supports Safari, is simple to set up, and though Blogger lacks Categories, it’s superior in every other way to Radio. Yes, I know, Blogger isn’t a news aggregator, but Radio doesn’t approach the efficiency, ease of use, and sheer elegance of NetNewsWire (which now also posts to Blogger, Bloxom, LiveJournal, and MoveableType).

I’m going to install Sixapart‘s MoveableType. Eventually, I’ll probably try Rael Dornfest’s Bloxom, which looks interestingly spare. Then of course, I hope to be able to try Dean Allen’s interesting TextPattern, and then there’s the intriguing possibility of TypePad, also from Sixapart, the makers of MoveableType.

In the meantime, I’ll still be posting to DigitalMedievalist: Scela, and to my class blog with and for my students. I’m going to be trying a new ISP as well, so wish me luck.