OK, this post has nothing to do with movies. I just want to say how much I am enjoying using Blogger. I had thought about using a blog for quite awhile now, since everyone has been raving about the ease of use. Dreamweaver is a wonderful program, but even it doesn’t come close to the convenience of blogging. Also, I was starting to feel left out on the Internet. It seemed like I was the only guy on the planet who didn’t have a blog. But what has been holding me back is the rather limited choices out there. LiveJournal looks like it might be fairly easy to use, but the fact that you have to pester existing users for an invite to start using the service is just annoying. I realize that the LiveJournal folks have their reasons for doing this. But my guess is that whatever benefit they may be deriving from limiting how quickly their service grows, is badly outweighed by the number of people who go away from their service annoyed at the fact that their community is run like a little clique. That’s no reflection on those who use the service, I’m just not inclined to have to suck up to complete strangers so I can get some free hosting. I also looked at Moveable Type. This seems to be the ultimate piece of software for all of the serious bloggers out there. I guess MT is so popular because it is so highly configurable. The people at TechTV, to whom I look to for all things computer, seem to be using MT for many of their personal blogs, and they are all very impressive looking. Check out Leo Laporte’s or Chris Pirillo’s blogs for what you can do with a little effort with Movable Type. Some TechTV folks, like Morgan Webb and Megan Morrone, are using LiveJournal, which also seems to be pretty configurable. But I suspect TV personalities don’t have to work real hard to get an invite to use the service. Nor would it hurt their chances that they are able to publicize LJ on the air. The problem with MT is that it is a royal pain in the butt to set up and configure. Maybe it is a breeze to use once set up correctly, but it is like banging your head against the wall to get it to that point. And I might add that I don’t consider myself a web design newbie by any means, I was hand coding my first web site in 1996. As an example of my complaint, I downloaded and started trying to install MT on Saturday afternoon. By around Sunday evening, after many painful hours, I finally gave up without any success and started looking for another alternative, in the hopes that I could find something to help me avoid having to try again to get MT working. I’m not sure why I never noticed Blogger up to that point, TechTV’s Chris Pirillo recommends it. (Although he uses MT for his own site, which suggests to me that there has to be some serious benefits to that product.) I usually make a point to check out what the folks at TechTV are talking about, since they generally know their stuff inside and out. Regardless, within about 15-20 minutes, I had Blogger set up and ready to roll. Within the next couple of hours I had also managed to track down my third party comments generator, tweak the layout to my blog more to my liking (still a few more improvements to make, by the way), and post my first entry. This is my third entry into this blog in under a day, and I have no doubt that I would still be struggling with Movable Type if I hadn’t found Blogger. Please don’t take this as a rant against MT, because considering its positive reviews, I’m certain that the struggle to install it would be worth it. In fact I will probably continue to play with it until I get it working. Although given that I see no real limitations with Blogger, I have serious doubts that I will be making the transition if, or when, I get it working. I guess for me, the allure of blogging is that it is supposed to make publishing to the Internet a whole lot more easy. But when setting up the tools are so difficult (or demeaning, in the case of LiveJournal), they are creating even more barriers than they are bringing down.

¶ 8/19/2002 06:06:00 PM //

Welcome to The Rant. Unlike most blogs, this one is going to focus more on my warped view of the world, rather than the trivial minutia of my daily life. So no posts about what I ate for breakfast.

¶ 8/18/2002 06:16:00 PM //