revjim.net

I use Movable Type to manage revjim.net, and I hate it.

I want comment threading. It's more than annoying to have to specifiy who you are talking to each time you leave a comment in response to another comment, just so that it is clear who you are talking to.

I want comment notification. I hate visiting another Movable Type blog, because I know if I comment and am interested in what that person might say in return, I have to go back and reload their blog every 15 seconds in hope of a reply. It almost makes me prefer to email them instead of commenting, and that takes out half of the fun. I'm sure if this annoys me, it annoys my readers as well. Perhaps, instead of commenting on other blogs, I should merely post my response on revjim.net with a link to them, and hope that they see it. I guess that's what trackback is for but, like me, a lot of people don't like or enable trackback. Additionally, my thoughts on his post might be short, silly, and not of interest to my readers, so posting it here means that my readers have to suffer through it. And finally, not all blogs support trackback and not all my readers have websites of their own to post a response in.

I hate Perl and therefore, I hate that it is written in Perl. Part of me wants to make my Movable Type templates just be pure XML, and then write an XML parser in PHP to read them and display them the way I want them to look. But, with all of that, I may as well design my own admin interface and bypass MovableType all together. The benfit of this, is that I can extend the functionality of revjim.net in the programming language of my choice, without having to hack it in with a server side include, or by including PHP instructions in my MoveableType templates. I want to add my own hooks into MovableType. I want to add referer tracking. I want to add pingback.

I want dynamic content. I hate that the pages are statically generated. I'd glady trade the CPU time required to generate the page everytime for the additional flexability this affords me.

Why do I use MovableType then? Because, even with all of these limitations, problems, and short-commings, it is still the best thing I have found.