Movable Type, the “personal publishing system” that I use as the back-end for this site, turned four years old yesterday. During that time, it has grown up from a hokey little piece of beggarware to one of the most popular platforms from which technorati scream their drivel for public consumption. The feature set has grown greatly, a great many interesting plugins have been developed (several of which are used on this site, though you may never have noticed), they’ve launched their own hosted service, and have rewired their licensing system to encourage keeping the mouths of their employees fed. Did I mention they actually have employees now? Wow.

Personally, I hopped on fairly early in the game, in June of 2002 (my initial launch resulted in some badly-munged .db files, and are no longer available). I wasn’t sold on the idea of managing a website via a web interface at the time, and installed it largely as an excuse to tinker with the CGI and wrapping setup of my ISP, which happens to provide me with shell access. I set a goal for myself to actually place new content on the web of a fairly-regular basis and redesign the site almost continuously, seeing this as a means of keeping myself motivated to keep reasonably sharp on my web-development skills. I kept that up for a fair while, managing nine separate style-sheets during the first eight months or so. Eventually discovered that there really isn’t a lot of gee-whiz design that I actually like doing, much less enjoy looking at, and settled on something I found to be acceptable. There have been three major visual revisions of this site since then.

Things I’ve liked about Movable Type as opposed to WordPress (which my friends Augie and Dan use) include the excellent plugin availability that was available when I got started. Granted, a lot of catch-up has been played, so that isn’t as strong an argument as it used to be. Also, I found the support fora on the Movable Type site to be tremendously helpful in getting my wits about me in the brave new world of weblogging. As I have a better idea of how such things work in general now, this isn’t as strong an argument as it used to be. I also liked, and continue to enjoy, how easily one can set up custom templated in this system. One can have great variance in layout and content between various types of pages on a Movable Type site, which lends it towards use as a CMS for sites other than silly little vanity blogs such as this one. Other tools that provide this level of flexibility have had, in my experience, a far more punishing learning curve, and customizing WordPress looks like it involves some serious tooth-pulling.

All of this comes about as I’m seriously contemplating moving a number of sub-projects away from my trusty MT back-end, possibly going so far as to run my own Mandrake box. Movable Type has been a good buddy of mine for over three years now, but with licensing changes leaving the newer versions out of my reach (money I don’t intend to spend) or severely-neutered (one blog, one author), something’s got to give.

Thanks for a lovely product, SixApart, I’ve enjoyed it greatly, and wish you well.