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November 17, 2005
The obligatory MT entry
I’ve been working on Bookslut, redesigning (which is a huge strain on me — I hate everything I do, which I feel is an important part of the process), rearranging, and recoding. Once I’m done, it will have the much-requested author-pages and sortable entry indexes (by date, title, and category) be in mostly valid XHTML (I say mostly because I’m not going back to change every apostrophe from the last two years of articles, and I won’t be held responsible for the ads), and be a nice, text-heavy-but-pleasantly-spaced, multi-column layout of pink, brown, and peach (colors I got from some of my favorite dirty pictures, which is appropos). It will also still use Movable Type for the time being, though I’m checking into alternatives as we speak. The big news, if you haven’t heard, is that MT is now charging money to use their product. You see that spiky circle in the upper left hand corner? That means it’s not free. Really it was never intended to be, as many of us are suddenly learning.
Bookslut is a special case because it shouldn’t have been built with MT to begin with. It’s too big and has too much information, and it clearly needs a custom management system rather than a heavily customized blogging system. We’ve never really run ads (except for the past couple of weeks), and we’ve never violated the terms of service such as they were, but we currently have 73 past and present authors on Bookslut, which under the new liscencing structure is way off the chart. The most they offer is 20, and that costs $700. We couldn’t pay them enough to let us properly upgrade, and we’d be extremely disinclined to anyway. That’s a hefty chunk of change to shell out for something that won’t work for us.
My own blog is a different matter. This is just a blog, and MT has served me very well for the past — oh, I forget how long. A year and a half? Two years? But I’m leaving MT, too. This is not hysteria, and I’m not balking at the prospect of having to pay for something I previously got for free. It’s a good product, and had I been asked, I would have gladly shelled out a reasonable sum to use it. They never asked.
Now they’re asking. They’re no longer being all lovey and squishy about their fundamentally proprietary nature, which is certainly within their rights. What MT has done is taken steps to make sure that their product is being used in the way they intended. If you’re just one blogger, all by your lonesome with three or fewer blogs, it’s still free. If you’re thinking of building a small empire, however, you gotta cough up some scratch. Fair enough.
And still, I don’t care to pay for software when there are many, many programs that will do what I want to do for nothing, and they might do it better, faster, easier, and with more standards-compliance as well. Mark Pilgrim defines the problem more precisely than I can.
Freedom 0 is the freedom to run the program, for any purpose. WordPress gives me that freedom; Movable Type does not. It never really did, but it was “free enough” so we all looked the other way, myself included. But Movable Type 3.0 changes the rules, and prices me right out of the market. I do not have the freedom to run the program for any purpose; I only have the limited set of freedoms that Six Apart chooses to bestow upon me, and every new version seems to bestow fewer and fewer freedoms.
I have four blogs, not because I have four separate things to blog about but because of some quirks of MT that will not allow me to categorize the way I want to. And I have a friend on my system as well, so that’s two authors. And I’m not going to pay $100+ dollars for that.
Look, I have no hard feelings, really I don’t. It’s just that of the two sites I run, one is totally unsuited for MT, which is my fault, and the other is something I’m far more interested in playing with and learning from than paying for. This site isn’t something huge and important that I need to rely on, it’s the place where I come to bullshit about things that no one cares about but me and to experiment with the neat CSS and PHP tricks I just learned. I don’t really care about rock-solid reliability or professional tech support. I care about tinkering under the hood, scribbling, and maybe chatting with some like-minded people about it on some forum. That kind of thing will always and forever be free, save for the cost of server space.
MT is for the kind of people who don’t have the time or inclination to tinker, but who do have money on hand. MT’s userbase has just changed completely, or at least been severely polarized. I’m of the camp that understands (suddenly) that I’ve been living on their couch for a long time, and they finally got up the nerve to ask me to pay rent or get out. I thought it was a free meal and bath, but it’s not, and it never was. Here’s the thing, though — there are couches all over town. Dozens of them. Some are even bigger and cushier.
Coming soon: WordPress. You’ll see that Bookslut redesign soon, too, but it will remain on MT until I can take the proper time to plan, build, and set up a new site. Could be months.
You know what? I’m excited about this. I know I’m a sick individual, but I LOVE rearranging things, setting things up all over again, starting from scratch, learning new platforms. MT taught me how to manipulate their custom code based in Perl pretty darn well, but that’s not too useful outside of MT. WordPress is based in php, which means at the very least that I’ll be looking at a lot of common php expressions all day long, and surely it’ll soak in. And that’s useful anywhere.
