A movable feast

Julie asks how I like MovableType as a blogging tool. I started blogging the old-school way: HTML by hand, posted manually. Eventually I graduated to Dreamweaver, which gave me some site management and link-checking tools (see my old travel diaries for a sample.) This approach has its champions, notably Bob Thompson and Jerry Pournelle. However, the bad news is that this approach ties you to a particular tool (see Bob’s many rants about FrontPage).
In the new world, we can use tools like MovableType that provide content management. These tools keep track of the posts, sorting and ordering them. The better ones apply styles to keep everything looking consistent; the best, like MT and Radio Userland, support protocols (like XMLRPC) that allow blogging tools to work together. I can drive MT from any web browser, or I can use purpose-built tools like BlogApp or BlogBuddy to quickly post items with better editing tools than Internet Explorer provides.
Overall, I like MT quite a lot. It’s very stable, it has an attractive interface, and I can use it from any browser-equipped machine. (Note, alas, that you don’t get all of the editing bells & whistles on Mac browsers; I’m not sure why this is yet.) Even better, it is inexpensive and very well-supported (not that I’ve needed any support yet). Once I get it set up properly, so that I can use BlogApp, it’ll be even better. Honorable mention goes to Radio Userland, which does all kinds of cool stuff that I don’t fully understand yet. Radio has a slick desktop client, which you are free not to use, and a powerful macro language. However, for my relatively modest needs MT is just the ticket. I give it two thumbs up.