July 2007 Archives

I think Movable Type 4 (MT4) shows real promise, but it has some show stoppers that will thwart adoption unless they're fixed.  It's still in beta, so there's likely time. 

In case you don't know, Movable Type is a blog publishing software you can install on your own server.  Version 4 is such a major upgrade that it might be considered almost a total rewrite.

Put loosely, the goal of the rewrite is to both make the software simpler for novice users and more  powerful for those wishing to do more sophisticated things.  I think it is this set of conflicting goals that is leading to the show stoppers.  Consider the following:

• MT4 provides a wizard installer.  The idea of wizards is to remove the complexity of installation by solving the hard parts in software.  Well, not all of MT's installation issues are solvable in software because they depend on configuring the system on which MT is installed.  For example, MT needs permission to write to the server's hard drive which in turn requires configuration of some aspects of the server which are themselves complicated to resolve because of security issues.  Installing with the MT Wizard actually leads to an installation that does not function properly due to these issues.  There is no easy way to resolve this issue.  New users, unfamiliar with the intricacies of server computing, will reach this point and be stuck.
  
• MT4 supports sophisticated article styling, but those styles are broken.  I think this one is fairly easy to fix, but it is extremely disappointing when you encounter it in the beta, giving an extremely unfinished feel to the software.
• MT4 aims to support podcasting.  Unfortunately, the default file sizes it allows you to upload are so small that they do not accomodate media files.  Again, another broken feature that seems fixable but leaves one wondering.

There are many additional issues like this.  For my money, MT should lose the wizard.  It doesn't work.  I also think they should continue to support the previous version for the next year as this version becomes production ready.  It's hard to imagine that happening in short order.

Last I wrote, we had just launched Michigan Innovators, I was considering Movable Type 4, and (perhaps not really blogged about here a lot) I was preparing to go to Pittsburgh for the CASOS Institute.

Well, a lot happened, and I got sucked in.  Here's a highlights reel:

• Producing videos for Michigan Innovators using the technology I had developed for MuscleVentures proved to be unworkable.  Michigan Innovators interviews were just too long, and I wanted to be able to edit them.  The short answer is that we did a significant upgrade.  That has been overall good but has taken some getting used to.
• The initial Movable Type 4 betas were more like alpha quality, hard to get to even install in some standard settings.  Not confidence inspiring.  Now, after 6 weekly beta updates, I can say that things have come along nicely, and this blog may soon move to MT4.  Lots of great capabilities (though bugs remain).  The biggest issue in my view is that the post editor is still not producing well-formed html.  This makes any sort of post processing difficult and really really needs to get fixed.
• The CASOS institute taught me enough about dynamic (social) network analysis that I am readdy to incorporate analyses into the learning remix.  That's an exciting and absorbing project.