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Fun With Wordage 3.0 {Beta}

Last night I shut down this blog for almost 24hrs. It’s now open, but not fully restored. It will take me a while to put everything back, finish cleaning up, and debugging. There are known issues (I’ll talk about those and how you can help in a moment).

I’m no longer using MovableType. Instead I choose to go with WordPress. I choose it for several reasons (in no particular order):

  • Licensing (GPL) – Is very friendly and open source. I’m an open source kind of guy. So that makes me feel good.
  • Good HTML validation – Unlike MovableType, it doesn’t seem to want to put tags everywhere mangling the html. It’s very smart. I don’t need to do stuff like make posts all 1 line to get it to stop messing up my code.
  • Compatible – I’m was able to import everything with no real trouble.
  • Feature Packed – look at the comparison
  • Spam Prevention – I find it easier to hack with WordPress than MovableType. So I can put some good anti-spam solutions in place. Rather than wait for plugins to evolve. This isn’t an insult towards Jay Allen. I’ve said more than once his mt-blacklist saved this blog. I just don’t think it’s the best solution. Nor do I like being so reliant on others. His list goes down for a day and the spammers get the upper hand. I don’t like moderating all comments either.
  • Speed – fast UI. Database driven, no rebuilds. Very nice.
  • Learning – I plan to use WordPress a bit professionally, so getting acquainted with a blog is a perfect first step.

MovableType is good, and still is by far the most popular. It’s also the best choice for someone running a large install. If you have an organization for example, MovableType is bar far the best solution (as of this posting date). But for a geeky individual like me who likes to tinker, and likes features and open source, WordPress is better. I found WordPress to be more innovative and open. It’s administrative features are better. Though MovableType has a slightly nicer skin. The PHP based templates are far superior to those proprietary tags.

Overall, I’m pretty happy so far. Some new features already are in place, and more will be coming.

New Features

  • Smilies for your comments. As well as select html tags.
  • You should be able to view this site fairly well on a PDA or cell phone now.
  • RSS feeds galore. Including for comments on a specific post.
  • Lower Page Size. Should be much faster for my 56k friends.
  • Highlighting text on search.
  • Much more!

And more is on the way.

Known Issues

  • Images in some posts overextend the div (anyone know why?)
  • Some feeds still broke
  • Some toys on the left hand column are missing
  • Spam Prevention stuff is considered ‘beta’. Checking out how well it works.
  • Contact form hasn’t been brought into new system.

8 replies on “Fun With Wordage 3.0 {Beta}”

WordPress is database driven, but I believe MovableType is only database driven.

Antony: MovableType creates static pages. So a small design tweak requires regenerating in my case hundreds of pages. The category pages are also several hundred KB already (and growing). That’s lots of CPU and disk space.

Which means more server load when people are viewing… But less server loads when spammers are working on pumping up their Google ranks.

So, I have an even greater solution… disable commenting and use static pages.
Just I don’t want to disable the commenting.

It’s load is pretty minimal. Especially with today’s modern servers. It’s not doing any complex stuff. Just pulling the post from the DB, and print.

So, it won’t have so many connections to the database server, unlike running a forum?

And how do you prevent SPAM then? Do you have something similar to MT-Blacklist?

It doesn’t appear to use as many connections as a forum. At a minimum… doesn’t appear any worse. I’m still checking out the code a bit more. But considering how often I had to rebuild to clean out spam on MT… this should lower my average cpu consumption a bit…. unless I get slashdotted.

There are a few spam tools available. It has it’s own blacklist feature. Spaminator is also very good. Using my MT-Blacklist and Spaminator, it’s been foolproof thus far. 😀

Another great feature is the rss feeds per post. Very spiffy to track comments. Will be even nicer when Mac OS X 10.4 ships with Safari having RSS support. Firefox already has some RSS support.

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