Movable Type rules the Tokyo blogscape
Looking around the Tokyo blogscape, I can’t help but notice that I’m probably the only one using pMachine for my blog. Just about everyone else is using Movable Type. That’s a pretty powerful endorsement!
Having looked over both, I can see that Movable Type is probably quite a bit better in some areas, but I’m not at all unhappy with pMachine. I briefly thought about setting up a separate MT blog, but what would I use it for? (I don’t have time to keep two blogs!)
I use blosxom. MT was just a big headache for me. There were so many little niggle things you had to do in order for MT to be happy. Oh, and MT is as big as an elephant. Blosxom is like an ant hiding under your coffee table; 135 lines of code.\r
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You can use TexEdit, NotePad, BBedit, or any thing that can save a .txt file to blog. Or you can use NetNewsWire Pro or Blapp.
Yes, the size and overhead involved in MT was one of the reasons I chose pMachine instead. Because MT is driven by Perl instead of PHP, it is much more robust--but that robustness comes at a price.\r
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pMachine, on the other hand, is extraordinarily easy to maitain. It takes only a few minutes to install (approximately 10) and--apart from stylistic issues, like what kind of CSS to apply--it requires very little attention thereafter.\r
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I have looked at Blosxom. It is quite clever for such a small amount of code, but it doesn’t have many of the features that I have come to love about pMachine.\r
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NetNewsWire Pro and Blapp, of course, are also quite good, but I’m not about to switch to either of those at this point.\r
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It is curious, though, that so many Tokyo-area bloggers use MT, don’t you think? Granted, it’s quite good (and the price is right), but there are other good blogging solutions out there--as we have shown. Is it the case that MT was simply the first to market, or does it have a strong local following for some other reason?
Systems I have tried:\r
1.Greymatter. Pre-Blogger.com. Greymatter’s interface defined unfriendly.\r
2.MT. Failed to install.\r
3.Blogger.com. Read about blogger.com in Popular Science. Blogger goes down. Blogger gets hacked. Blogger does not allow me to remote blog. Blogger belonged to someone else. Back to MT.\r
4.MT pt. II. This time I was on OS X with UNIX goodness. Success. MT required me to learn UNIX, still forced me to login just to write a post, and ate up a ton of space. Oh, and it was slow. At that time, MT was just the most popular and it was the opposite of blogger.com. But it still forced me to login to blog.\r
5.Blosxom. Small. Simple. Remote.\r
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That probably didn’t make much sense. Sorry.
Not at all, your post made perfect sense.\r
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Although I have never tried Greymatter (and, judging from your comments, I’m not missing much), I have looked at the others.\r
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Blogger was a bit disappointing: All hype, no joy. Although I think that the folks at Blogger had a lot of good ideas, the implementation was pretty poor--even if you upgraded to Blogger Pro (which I did, then immediately regretted, then undid). In Blogger’s case, I think Pyra was simply trying to earn money before the product was really mature. Lesson: Selling a product that isn’t yet ready for the market--no matter how cool the concept may be--is a Bad Idea.\r
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Aside from the work involved in setting up MT, you are right, it is a bit slow. pMachine, on the other hand, is light and fast (maybe not as light as Blosxom, but I bet it’s about as fast). \r
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No, before you ask, I don’t make any money from recommending pMachine. I just like it, that’s all.
LOL! I advocate many products I do not profit from. I stand by blosxom and you stand by pMachine. We can still be friends, can’t we?\r
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Mail me.
I used Blogger for a while...not fun...the templates were restrictive and there were many problems in updating.\r
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I’m a MT blogger - I don’t find it slow, and it was kinda fun setting it up! Plus you have lots of control over what you can do with it - and there are lots of extra things out there which people have made to do cool things...\r
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Plus we have a little community now - so if someone has a problem help is but a quick e-mail away...\r
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And the people who made MT just seem so nice...\r
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MT=kewl\r
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*suspects she’s just made 2 enemies*
I personally have nothing against MT. MT is robust but a pain in the butt to set up. pMachine may be next on the list for a group project. Nudge nudge.\r
well, i think one of the reasons behind MT’s status as blogging app of choice (for Japan bloggers, that is, that write in Japanese), is due to the language pack that was written for MT by the Neotony team. I’m not really up on the language support other blogging tools provide for Japanese users, but it’s clear a lot of them were probably using home-made solutions and then seemingly switched en masse to MT when the lang. pack was released last November. (this is kind of gleaned knowledge, I can’t actually read these sites at this point). Among japan-based bloggers writing in English, i think there’s a fairly wide spread among the different apps. I chose MT because, well, honestly I can’t even remember at this point (tho’ only 8 months ago)...I think I liked the way their site looked
but I’ve certainly been very happy with it and can’t see a reason to change at this point. certainly the best $20 i ever spent.
Yes, language support is certainly a big issue, but more so for Japanese than expats, I imagine. Of the gaijin MT blogs I read regularly, not so many of them are using Japanese (okay, some do occasionally).\r
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I once contacted the pMachine developer about producing a Japanese language pack, but so far there is none. \r
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You think there is a wide spread of blogging apps among the gaijin set, Kurt? Which ones?
well, maybe not a “wide spread”, but you’ve got bloxsom, blogger, live journal, xanga, radio, and a bunch of, well, proprietary ones, for lack of a better term (perhaps “home-grown” is better)...and of course you’ve got pMachine. But yeah, MT seems to dominate, with blogger running a decent second (i have a whole long list of them on my site should anyone want to investigate further
. I’d be curious what the “market share” stats are in general, outside of Japan. Certainly MT is a newer kid on the block, but I’ve got to think it’s share is substantial.
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