Movable Type Licencing
With reference to this: I have four of my own movable type blogs: this one, the link log, the photo section, and Bloggus Caesari. There not having been restrictions on authors/weblogs before, I host two friends’ sites (and one that has never been used). One of those friends’ sites has three somewhat active authors. I had plans to set up two more blogs for my own purposes (music / video clips), and I want to be able to help any friend of mine who thinks they might want to set up a blog by giving them one. It might sound cheeseball but I think it’s important to help people express themselves if I can. The first announced MT prices were outrageous for my purposes, but the revised prices are more realistic. Basically, the five-blog personal licence would cover me and the introductory price doesn’t seem too much to ask; however, it would prevent me from starting new sites with abandon.
It’s worth mentioning that I also set up skitfaced with moveable type. We don’t use it there anymore since that experiment in short-form text comedy was sort of a failure, but for a while it was pretty neat: we could easily set up a new site and make up a few (fictional) authors. Basically we used it as a CMS. This would be prohibitively expensive with MT now.
With the new $10/author add-on thing, realistically I’m not all that constrained in terms of starting new sites for others. And I’m definitely not opposed to the licencing right now or the idea of paying for software or anything like that (I donated). But what I would really like is the option to buy MT with unlimited blogs/authors. Because now that I’ve looked around, you have your free, open source WordPress which soon I hear will have multiple blog support, and you have your ExpressionEngine which gives you unlimited blogs/authors and a whole lot more, for less than MT. (And I suppose you have blogger, for free too, but been there & done that.) I wasn’t looking at the competition before, but I am now, and I’m a bit tempted. Maybe I never will, but I like to imagine that I might start up another fictional blog, or maybe a film-specific site, or something for my friends, and coughing up $10 each time… well, it feels constraining.
UPDATE: rest moved here
Why would you pay for something that can be found free, like “Blogger”? Do you miss some great feature?
Yes. I used to use blogger, and MT has many more features (as do pretty much all the other blog CMSs). Also, blogger used to be very unreliable, which is a drawback for a hosted service – although things have gotten better since google bought them.
Back in the day, ie less than a year ago, you couldn’t have comments on a blogger blog without installing a separate comment system.