I found some new blog software yesterday that I'm toying with the idea of using. It's called Movable Type. It's quite different from Blogger and is definitely the "geek's" blogging solution. Installation took about an hour to get all the components in their proper places and installed as well as file permissions set. The configuration options for it are staggering.
It's entirely hosted on your own server space and does nothing with the Movable Type website, unlike Blogger. This means that I'm no longer at the mercy of the Blogger site being up in order for me to post. It also uses Perl, which I'm not too crazy about. The last program I used that required Perl was PopFile for spam filtering. PopFile worked like a charm once it was properly trained. It used perl to parse the emails and store/load/compare the word list it created. The thing is that the perl executable turned out to be an incredible resource hog. It ended up holding 30-40MB of RAM, which I thought was pretty unacceptable considering it was being used by a program only in execution during SMTP transactions. I got rid of PopFile after that. I hope this doesn't turn out to be the same.
Other improvements for Movable Type:
- Integrated comments system with full control over them through web admin (including IP blocking)
- RSS v1.0 and v2.0 syndication. I had written a PHP script that created an RSS v1.0 compatible feed from the page, but this is a more complete solution.
- Categorization of posts. This might be useful since I talk about all sorts of things on this page.
- Integrated search feature.
- Much more powerful and better archive support.
- Supports importing Blogger posts so I wouldn't lose anything or have to re-enter posts.
Of course, this all comes on the announcement that the now Google-owned Blogger is folding their subscription based Blogger Pro and wrapping its features in to the free Blogger. Their Blogger Pro web site is acting funny for me, so I have no idea what this entails right now.