The Best of All Worlds?

It's not that I am so in love with typepad's interface. Frankly, I find it on occasion inconsistent and clumsy. However, it has the advantage of a large network of people that use it, good documentation, and actual support people who answer help tickets. It's to the point that I have no doubt that an intelligent college student can get it, master it, and start to experiment with it. For the time being, Typepad is really the interface winner.

However, with all due respect, Movable Type and by extension Typepad's back-end is tantamount to a hack. In fact, Ben Hammersley is currently co-authoring a book about how to further hack Movable Type. The advantage of MyST is its underlying semantic data representation that transfers through to the organization and interrelation of knowledge in its various output formats (blog, RSS, etc.).

MyST's challenge comes in marrying this elegant back-end to a highly serviceable front-end. The front-end works, but it just does not have the level of finish and support as Typepad's. For a one-man shop, i.e., me teaching this course, incurring high user support costs is not an option.

Now, back in the old days of “I have to go to one vendor for everything”, we would have been forced to choose one or the other. However, the atom syndication format has come to our rescue. Typepad outputs a valid atom feed that comes replete with all sorts of metadata including the full post. MyST consumes atom. So, students can produce in Typepad, and we can synthesize in MyST.

The best of both worlds? Gee, I hope so. It's what is making the Distributed Learning Blogosphere possible