As long time readers have noticed (all 3 of you, that is), everything is different. Very different. Indeed.

New design + Hacked WordPress theme made to work with MT4 = Aggravation.

I’ve used Movable Type since 2003, when I started posting crap on the web and dipped my toes in the blog pool. I loved it then. Those were simpler times as I zipped through posts with version 2.something. Version 3 came out. I snagged it and rode it out to 3.38 and stopped there. See, when MT4 came out I played with it, got a feel for it… and hated it. The overall back end slowness made me feel like I was being tortured. I work on server-class hardware that finishes doing what I tell it to do before I finish telling it what to do, so when I click a button I expect results. With MT4, I click a button and go work on my cold fusion generator, because that’ll be finished before MT loads a template editor.

Believe me, I tried to like it. I really did. I used it on the Cut Dave’s Hair site as well as the I/O site. And there’s a reason neither of those two sites saw a great deal of me. CDH saw infrequent updates and I/O hasn’t seen an update since last year and that was only because I was hoping someone passing by would see the post and offer up advice because slow system response time killed my love affair with Movable Type.

Despite that, I pressed ahead with MT when I started tearing down the walls around here. I found this theme, but it was only a WordPress theme. And then I found it had been converted to an MT theme and I rejoiced. Three plugins later (Three! TO LOAD A THEME!) I had a blog that looked how I wanted. And then while testing, I discovered I had no comments. Now, I don’t really give a shit one way or the other if someone is going to post comments. I leave that ability in place in case someone feels like showing the internet how big of a douche bag asshole they can be. Because it amuses me. Lack of an easy way to apply this theme and have working comments made me pack my bags, download WordPress, grab the archive for this theme, and voila! Here we are.

Here’s where the sad part comes in…

I spent about 2 hours poring over everything in MT I could think of checking to make comments work. That’s after an initial setup that took about 30 minutes for me to get everything “just right”.

WordPress was up, configured, themed, and rolling in 10 minutes.

The lesson here, boys and girls, is if you want to implement any kind of blogging solution on a website – use WordPress. If you’re a masochist who’s looking for a less messy alternative to ripping out your toenails while simultaneously stuffing a rabid badger up your ass, just to have a good time – use Movable Type.