07:29 PM
Internet Pick one: MT or LJ

Jason asked: Do you like MT or LJ better? And why?

Weeeeellll...

Movable Type Pros

I love MT because it runs on my domain so I can back it up easily and it's html pages that I can format and style with html and CSS and the amount of MT code that I have to learn is minimal - it also has excellent help documentation so I don't have to remember the MT tags, I can always find them in Help easily.

I'm a picky person, I like being able to give in to a redesign urge, to have my journal pages as wild or sedate as I like them, to try out new HTML/CSS things, play with graphics, make it totally my own. I like being able to tweak there and tweak here and add a links section and a tidbits column and backgrounds on mouseover and underlines and borders and all that. MT satisfies that urge.

Movable Type Cons

Nobody leaves comments. Jason did because I asked and he's a sweetie! But normally it's a very blue moon when someone leaves a comment at my MT blog. And the nasty spammers made me do work to keep them out. Buggers on them.

Live Journal Pros

Comments coming out my ears! People talk, they comment, they reply to comments and not only do I get an email when there's a comment left on my entries (which MT does also), if someone replies to someone else's comment on my entry, that person gets an email so then they reply to the reply and the conversation keeps going.

Live Journal is where I find fandom people, I've run into people I used to know from other parts of fandom but had lost track of and I've gotten to know people in fandom that I wouldn't normally because they hang out in entirely different parts, except for LJ where we cross paths.

I can lock an entry so that only my friends see it or a few of my friends or this other group of my friends or no-one but me can see it. That's nice to have although not terribly critical.

Live Journal Cons

Unless I feel like learning tons about whatever is necessary to really format and layout an LJ, I can't really fix it exactly like I want it. And it's not on my domain, I can't backup everything, I especially can't backup comments which is the more valuable part of an LJ to me.

And it's not on my server, it's on theirs and they get swamped and overloaded and probably 50% of the time I go there, there's some problem - that' not to say that LJ is down 50% of the time - I don't go that frequently, once/twice a week, sometimes less than that and I just tend to hit the bad times. LJ is big and that makes it a target for twerps to try to take them down and that kind of thing doesn't happen on my server since I'm small and inconsequential and I'm careful about who I host and all that.

And there's all that cutesy stuff, what music you're listening to, what your mood is, and the icons (pet peeve - animated icons) and while I've gotten used to all that and I mostly ignore the parts I don't like, it still seems very thirteen year old girlish to me.

With the advent of plug-ins to auto-post from MT to LJ, it's better, I don't have to endure the LJ posting programs or plugins, although I do have the Firefox plugin for LJ in case I need to edit an entry and I can ignore whatever LJ format I've chosen because I don't go there as much. Lately I use Bloglines to read news and other people's blogs. The only thing I miss is LJ because if the entries are friends-locked then there's not much visible in an RSS which is only public entries but otoh, if I tried to read other people's blogs on LJ, I'd have to create a feed for each of them and there's a limit to how many you can do. Bloglines (and any RSS reader) is flexible enough to let me quickly add feed, rearrange them, mix and match them and drop them whenever I like.

So what do I like better? MT or even WordPress - for the main reason that I get control. I probably won't ever completely abandon LJ because I like keeping in touch with friends there but I'll post to MT (or WordPress) first and use a plug-in to get it to LJ.