Actually, it isn’t *really* OT – a lot of what I’m going to be covering in this weblog is impacted by software and the various ways to use it. Besides, you’re my first comment (fitting, too! – for those of you who haven’t gone to visit my original blog inspiration, do – I’m adding SoapBoxBlog.com to my blogroll, go visit!)

I did settle on WP and I like it a lot. I have been using Blogger for a bunch of blogs and although it was working ok, I kept running into the categorization issue – blogs (good ones) sprawl. Without a taxonomy of sorts, the darn things get hard to follow and Blogger search sucks.

While I *adore* the MT install you did and it worked well for quite a while, the comment spam issues and my inability to maintain the durn software made it unacceptable in my book.

Oh, and did I mention I *hate* the pricing structure? While I would have no problem recouping costs from my commercial blog clients, that wasn’t my ultimate aim. I’m behind on writing up my whole case notes but they’ll all show up here now that I’m done (mostly) playing with all the toys.

So, ok: WP vs MT from my perspective:

1. I am all about author empowerment. I did this all myself, not knowing much beyond the basics. The installation took less than 2 minutes and I was done. Uploading the custom plugins and graphics template took another minute and then I was live online – and if it crashes, I don’t have to call anyone except myself. I know this b/c I’ve already done it, twice LOL

2. Did I mention how nice and easy the plugin and template features are? I love all the choices and options the community has generously spawned, and I’m deeply appreciative of not having to re-invent the wheel or beg for a programmer to add them. I think Alex King has gotten 80+ entires for the template contest, and some of them are quite good – there is a lot more variety freely available than with most other programs.

3. The templating system makes it easier for non-coders to get something customized. I haven’t done this template yet (I’m behind as usual) but I was able to take a pre-done template and customize this: http://www.officiallyqueer.com/ (it’s on the wrong url but you can see it was easy peasy.)

4. Once I figure out how to use mod_rewrite I can create cruft free URLs – that is a big plus from the SEO side.

5. Comment spam: I know MT has plugins and widgets to make it all stop, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to make them work. Call me stupid, but I didn’t want to bug you – I wanted to figure it out myself. It was a basic premise of my original theorum – low touch solutions that empowered authors, not enabled programmers.

WP appears to have installed all their magic under the hood so it was covered with install. I suppose there are additonal plugins that expand protection further, but I can tell you I haven’t had any spam at all since I ripped out MT and that was great, because I was getting 15-20 a day there for a while and it got old quick.

So, basically, I like WP. It isn’t perfect – I desperately need photoblog solutions and I haven’t worked the bugs out of the tools available to me to use with WP, but otherwise, I see it as a pretty robust solution for new bloggers.

I am not knocking MT as a solution in general – I have and do recommend both MT and Typepad as solutions and they’re working well for the people I know using them. For my purposes now, however, WP gave me the fastest and lowest cost of entry, so here we are.

I know, sorry you asked, right? LOL

Thanks for stopping by – hope all is well in your world.