Movable Type

Just imported the complete post content from my NevOn Experimental blog on TypePad. Complete success, no errors reported. A quick look through the blog seems to support that - nothing weird-looking as far as I can see.

That’s impressive. Although this blog is a small one, so to speak, I was half-expecting some errors. But all smooth.

Ok, so this MT blog is almost ready to assume the NevOn Experimental role in place of the TypePad blog of the same name. About the only thing to do now is re the domain. I need to re-map that domain, but not until I make the final move with the main blog on WordPress.

I learned a new word recently - “slammed,” your state of being when you have no time for almost anything except work, a state which seems to go on for ever. Can’t yet find this definition in any dictionary, but it’s quite an apt description of that state of being. Hence, no activity in this blog for nearly a month.

Re my experiments with Movable Type and WordPress, I spent a lot of time late last month in setting up the two blogs (MT here and WP here) as part of my learning process about each platform. As I’ve commented in this blog, I plan to use one of them as my new platform for my new primary blog - “NevOn 2.0″ - which will be hosted on my own hosted server rather than through TypePad as a hosting service.

Even though I’ve not had time this past month to physically do much with those experimental blogs, I have been thinking a lot about my next steps.

This is what’s in my mind right now - I will use WordPress as my primary blog platform.

My limited experience so far shows me very clearly that WordPress is much easier to use than Movable Type. So for my primary blog, I want a platform that enables me to achieve most of what I want to do, especially with look and feel, without constant recourse to help files or asking others for help. I read a good review in eWeek about WordPress.

Yet I still want to get to know Movable Type more, especially as in my perception it is more likely to be the platform that you’d want to go with if you were considering blogging within the enterprise, in particular with multiple blogs and/or multiple authors. As I talk to a lot of companies about corporate blogging, it’s important to me that I can speak from a position of hands-on experience when discussing platforms. Then there are the plans announced by Six Apart last week on Project Comet, their vision for the future of blogs and platforms. Very interesting indeed.

So I’m going to hedge my bets.

What I’m thinking is that I’ll develop my primary blog on WordPress and use Movable Type for secondary blogs like this one, NevOn Experimental (so maybe it was a subconscious reason why I switched styles yesterday on my MT experimental blog to match the style of this blog).

A major point still to decide - do I import all the content from my main blog to the new WordPress one, or not? Same with this blog to the MT one. Or do I leave them where they are and in effect start again with the new blogs? I’ve got a paid TypePad subscription through until the end of July 2006 so leaving them here isn’t a problem for at least another 10 months.

The other thing, too, is the nevon.net domain name. That’s currently mapped to both these TypePad blogs. I will re-map the domain to the new blog meaning that both of these TypePad blogs will revert to the underlying TypePad addresses. That will no doubt affect anyone who’s bookmarked any specific blog posts, but I can’t see how to avoid that.

I need to make a firm decision sooner rather than later, and then just do it…

First post to this MT 3.2 blog using the ecto for Windows offline editor, version 1.7.8.

Adding this MT blog to ecto as a new profile was very simple and the profile wizard worked just fine. So I’m pleased that the setup was so straightforward.

If this post works, then I have my preferred option up and running of writing posts offline and then publishing.

The only little glitch I can see is with ecto - in the create new post window, it doesn’t offer a line break option in the formatting drop-down list, just ‘none.’ So I have to manually add the paragraph tags to get paragraph breaks.

I had exactly the same behaviour when I installed this version to use with my TypePad blogs. But, somehow, the line break option eventually appeared. So maybe this will eventually happen here as well.

At last - some guidance on how to include tags in your sidebar!

Add Links to Sidebar - updated page in the MT 3.2 Knowledge Base.

As you can see on the right, I can now do it. Thanks, MT Support!