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This is boring site news; more ass poetry to follow. I’m debating whether or not to stick with Movable Type. Yesterday, Six Apart announced a tiered pricing structure for MT, with pricing based on the number of users and weblogs per installation. This came as something of a surprise:
The resulting debate is divided between the “what the fuck?” camp and the “pay for it, freeloader” camp. The latter group is exemplified by a-list blogger Dave Winer, who writes:
Yesterday we saw people complain about spending $60 for a big useful piece of software like Movable Type. I paid $60 for a cab ride in Geneva. A good dinner is $100.
Bear this quote in mind the next time you catch yourself thinking that the rhetoric of class warfare is quaint. Anyway, I fall into the “what the fuck?” group; I don’t believe that moral authority derives from my pocketbook. In a pinch, however, I can play that game; I’ve donated time, money, and effort to Six Apart in the past, and I will probably purchase an upgrade as a gesture of gratitude for two years of using Movable Type, not to mention, funnily enough, because I’m not the only user at this site.
Meanwhile, I’m looking at alternatives. I can’t afford this expense nor can I afford this hassle for every site that I run or plan to run. With free software (examples: the web server, database, and programming language needed to run Movable Type), this sort of thing is not a problem. Not because it’s free, but because it’s Free.
Incidentally, have you tried Gmail yet?
In other news, I’ve been running a free Blogger site for use when testing chompy’s Atom feed handling, and in response to a trivial technical complaint about banner ads, I received a complimentary upgrade to their ad-free service. Swell.
comments
Heh. Complain about the invalid HTML in the banners, and they remove them rather than fix them? That’s pretty funny.
posted by Phil Ringnalda on May 14, 2004 9:18 PM
If the Gordian Knot of tech support were to present itself, who could resist cutting it?
posted by jacob on May 17, 2004 9:26 AM
I would also like to add that it’s the selfless, helpful hacker types like Phil Ringnalda and Jacques Distler that make Movable Type worth using. Of course, I’ll soon have, um, paid support.
posted by jacob on May 17, 2004 10:32 AM
that’s really interesting about the free ad-free blogger account. did you really just complain about non-standard html? was it the iframe? i think that gmail is the most-useful web-based email client i’ve seen. certainly not the slickest (seen oddpost?) but the large storage and semantic labels make it an excellent catch-all account for retired addresses, mailing lists, etc. i can’t feel comfortable tying myself completely to a free email address, even if it comes from google. if it ever supports imap, i could change my mind.
posted by gabe on May 17, 2004 4:08 PM
Honestly, I wasn’t even complaining so much as I was submitting a bug report, because software quality assurance is in my blood.
I love gmail. The combination of a responsive client-side interface and fast servers makes it easily the best webmail software I’ve used. (I vaguely remember Oddpost, but didn’t it require IE or something like that?) Of course, I mentioned gmail precisely because you’re rolling the dice if you decide to rely on it. Then again, while all my email is mine to use as I please, my current primary email address is tied to a shitty domain registrar.
I would like IMAP support, but I think they’d have to play around with it a little because I doubt that IMAP handles 1GB of email in a single folder very well. Though I have no idea if IMAP’s performance shortcomings have to do with the IMAP protocol itself, IMAP server software, server hardware, or the IMAP clients I’ve used.
Meanwhile, I just spent my Movable Type money on comic books.
posted by jacob on May 17, 2004 7:14 PM
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