I’m experimenting with a parallel weblog setup for a few weeks. I’ve installed Movable Type on my server to see how it compares to Radio Userland. The MT installation was a bit more involved compared to Radio but the docs were fairly straightforward and I got it working. What prompted me to try this was that I just get the feeling Radio Userland is going nowhere. The underlying technology, Frontier, is still a great application and I use it for most of my web-based scripting/database apps but as a weblog app Radio is sometimes just too much work. I get the impression that Manila is a better weblogging environment but finding a commercial Manila host, and one that allows you to install your own scripts/plug-ins isn’t easy.
The most obvious difference between Radio and MT so far is reliability of posting. Upstreaming via Radio is a real dog most of the time, even via FTP to my own server. Not so with MT. I use MarsEdit (a great app by the way – try it!) all the time now to post rather than either Radio’s or MT’s own web-based client. So far with my MT posts it’s a breeze and 100% reliable. For some reason I usually have to force Radio to upstream my posts, especially if I post a couple of items in quick succession. That’s a real pain.
The other benefit of using MT is a real strategy for managing comment and trackback spam. There seems to be a concerted effort to get on top of this in the MT community. In contrast there seems to be little happening on the Radio Userland front.
I’ll duplicate all my Radio weblog posts to my new MT weblog for a while to see how things go. If MT is as useful as it looks like it’s going to be then I’ll ditch the Radio app. Then I’ll be looking out for advice exporting all my legacy posts from Radio into a format MT can import. Any tips will be gratefully received.