I use Live Journal cus it’s easy-peasy. I’m no web goddess (I only know a few HTML tags at best). But if there were a way I could have the same ease with more flexibility, I’d go for it!

i use blogger because i am no computer genius and i think that it is amazing enough i have managed to get that blog up and running without any major mishaps. although there are little things i would like to change, when my cc is down i will probably just go to blogger pro so i can get rid of the ads and be able to post pics.

As you know, I wrote my own because you told me to. That and the fact that I wanted total control of the look, the functionality and the responsibility.

This way I’m limited only by my free time and desire to do stuff. If I don’t know how to do something I want, I find out how to do it. This has been the guiding principle in my work as a developer and is of course, nothing new but it really helps undisciplined lazy sods like myself to live a better life…with love in our hearts and peace in…etc…yadda yadda…

My reasons for using g-blog versus MT:
– I also prefer the home-grown approach, and like tweaking and adding when I feel the urge.
– MT seems like more of a pain to set up and maintain, what with all the cgi / perl stuff and a more involved DB connection
– In general, I don’t like having to ‘sign up’ for services
– In general, I like to take the contrarian approach and ‘think different’ (to steal Apple’s line)
– As spam-blogging becomes more prevalent, Blogger and MT will be most susceptible… just like Windoze/Outlook are the most susceptible to viruses

Psorr is right to point out that MT and Blogger are the biggest targets for pranksters like the comment-spammers, but because MT has an open plugin architecture and lot of users who act as freelance developers it’s also blessed with a pretty responsive “immune system.” A variety of comment spam solutions were proposed within days of the first serious comment-spamming outbreaks a couple of months ago.

Whilst it’s true that if someone finds a chink in MT’s armour it’ll be easy to find sites to exploit, I don’t believe that the problem will be as severe as that caused by the MS/Outlook monoculture. MS aren’t really committed to making substantial changes to Outlook/IE in response to exploits, because they’ve made a conscious decision over the last decade to prioritise “user-friendly” features over security. (We’ll see how far their recent emphasis on security pays off.) By contrast, the MT developer community have so far proved themselves both willing and able to respond to exploits. There’s no guarantee that this will continue, but with so many tech-savvy people using MT I’m cautiously optimistic that MT will weather future attacks.

You’re right on the TrackBack thing, John. I originally had “not easily accessible to non-MT blogs” in my first draft but I lost it somehow. I still probably wouldn’t use them if they were easy to implement. That Daring Fireball article I linked (as well as the follow-up) do a good job of summarizing why.

Additionally, well, it’s like RSS. I spent the morning looking into generating RSS feeds via PHP. The coding bit itself wouldn’t be difficult but making my site conform to the “blog standard” would be a huge amount of work. I don’t always use titles, for instance, and I only have a couple categories. I’d have to go back through 3600+ posts and relabel them all. It’s not like I’ve got folks e-mailing me clamoring for an XML feed, either. The biggest impetus is just that “everybody else does it.” That’s kinda what irritates me, the pressure to conform to the majority. As MT gets more press, anybody that doesn’t conform to their idea of a “weblog” comes off looking substandard. Sure, we could write our versions of their features, but inevitably you just get weary of being marginalized and having to work harder to conform to a standard you don’t even necessarily agree with.

(Hmm. Replace MT with “PC-users” and I’d probably make the exact same argument. It’s like when companies request your CV and then get annoyed when it isn’t a Word document. I make a point of always sending plain-text or RDF, but a ridiculous percentage of HR departments now INSIST on proprietary formats. Yeah, I could hack something together to imitate it, but eventually you just get tired of fighting an uphill battle and start thinking about downloading a copy of XP off Kazaa, which doesn’t solve anything, really.)

So really I’m not sure what my problem is, to be honest. Non-technical people need easy ways to do this stuff. I recognize that. I’m just afraid that MT’s majority could become a monopoly, and once that happens they basically get to set the standards (whether consciously or just in the eyes of the public). Who’s to say that the next TrackBack-like innovation won’t be limited to MT blogs or have an even higher barrier to entry for non-MT sites? I’m just being paranoid, basically.

I’ve half-drafted a fairly lengthy response to your last two posts Kris, but it’s almost 1am here and I need to get some sleep so I’ll try to return to this discussion tomorrow. I certainly want to come back to this, because you’ve raised some very good points. (On re-reading: sorry if that sounds horribly patronising. It wasn’t meant to, honest!)

(NB: I’m out tomorrow night seeing The Return of the King. Obviously I’ll be posting the inevitable rave review of ROTK to Sore Eyes when I get back in tomorrow night, so it might be quite late tomorrow before I return to this discussion, unless I can find some time at lunchtime tomorrow to post from work.)

I started using LiveJournal because I didn’t have any web space of my own, I didn’t have time to put together something fancy on my own, and I wanted to be able to read my cousin’s friends-locked entries.

I’ve stayed with LiveJournal because I like the communities there (most of them), and there are so many features I appreciate (as well as new code and extra features constantly in development).

Mostly, I like that my friends list pools all the journals I read (as well as rss feeds) and orders them by the most recent entries, so it’s easy to stay up to date. I’m lazy; I like only having to go to one page to see what’s new. Also, I particularly enjoy the nifty feature of the LJ clients which notifies me when any “friended” journal has been updated by a blinking icon in my system tray.

I also really like the security options. I make most of my entries public, but I like having the option of making something friends-only, or specifying exactly which friends can see a particular entry. [For example, I could post asking for suggestions on what to get my brother for Christmas and not have to worry about him getting wind of it.]

I haven’t done a whole lot of customizing with my journal (just simple overrides), but from what I’ve seen, the customization options are extensive.

Oh, and the new features (like voice-posting by phone) are kinda fun. There’s no way I’d figure that out on my own.

I think it is annoying that you have to post as anonymous, and that if I respond to your comment, you don’t get the same little e-mail letting you know what the comment is. [Of course, you could solve that by just setting up a dummy account. *g*]

So yeah, that’s my two cents. And on a completely unrelated note, did you see the article I posted written by Gil Loescher about his experience in the bombing? I can’t believe he lost both his legs. . .

Well, maybe I should say why I hate blogger…. because nearly every damn time I tried to post, i was told it was “down for repairs”, or I’d get some kind of error. And since I didn’t pay for blogger pro, I wasn’t guaranteed any help. In fact, the reason one of my blogs, WWBSD, shut down was because of a blogger problem and after reposting my question several times over the course of 3 months, i still didn’t get any help. I guess I’d just like to find a blogging tool that lets me do my own thing, but at the same time, if I have any kind of question, they have a good sized forum or support center for me to find the answer myself. I just hate feeling all helpless like that. *sigh* ok, I’m done.