Ming the Mechanic: Rethinking blogs. By Flemming Funch Now, what was I saying?
I've forgotten, I'll have to read my own blog. The trouble with blogs, and microblogs too, for that matter, is that one tends to be locked into one track. It is still a bit too much like publishing. You know, if you were publishing a monthly magazine, you'd be expected to produce a certain number of articles, good pictures, a certain type of content, a certain number of pages, and it needs to be finished at the right time. A lot of my blog friends seem to be living and breathing social software. One channel is never enough. When I bother to write in my own blog here, I write about a variety of changing subjects. Right now I'm very busy in a little start-up company I'm a partner in. Recently my hobby in my limited spare time has been genealogy, tracking down current or long-dead family members. And there we're even still talking about Subjects, Topics, that one discusses somewhat from a distance.
It is not an easy problem to solve. Mike Davidson - Adding a “Subscribe” Bar to Your Blog. It makes me uneasy that such a huge number of people still visit blogs the old fashioned way: by checking them manually every now and then. This, of course, is in opposition to subscribing via RSS and then only clicking over when there is new content. I am guilty of keeping an extremely unpredictable publishing schedule at Mike Industries, sometimes posting multiple times per week, and other times going almost a month without any new entries. For this reason, I wish all readers were subscribers.
That way, no one would ever be greeting with old content. In an effort to convert more casual readers to subscribers, and hopefully convert people onto RSS in general, I’ve developed a PHP-powered module which prompts users to subscribe to my feed if they aren’t already. If you come to Mike Industries and don’t have at least one of two cookies, you see a bar encouraging you to subscribe via RSS or e-mail. If a user clicks over to Mike Industries from my feed, I set the “subscriber” cookie. MovableType 4 vs. Wordpress 2.2. Many bloggers, when first setting things up, are faced with one of the most critical decisions any blogger can make, that is, which CMS to use?
There are many out there, all with their respective pros and cons. In this post, I'll be looking at several key aspects pertaining to two of today's premier content management systems: Wordpress 2.2, and the new Movable Type 4, which launched today. Installation Wordpress is famous for its "5 minute installation", and once you've done it, anything slower will start feeling painful. All that's needed is having an SQL database set up, unzipping of the Wordpress zip (less than 1MB), editing the wp-config file, uploading it all to your server and running the install.php (ed. note: takes a lot longer than 5 mins on first try).
One of the first things I noticed in regards Movable Type is its relatively massive file size, 4MB - Wordpress is only a quarter of the size. Winner: Wordpress. Interface Now, on to Movable Type. Customization Winner: Tie. Stability.