I was reading through some of my very old posts and noticed that I used to spend a lot of time playing with different blog systems. At one point, I switched between wordpress and textpattern several times, constantly looking for the right set of features.
I seemed to have been very preoccupied with the relative featurefulness of the templating systems, and the flexibility of the categorization mechanisms. Then I suddenly stopped. As of now, I’ve been using movable type for over two years now. I don’t remember why I stopped switching, but I think it was because MT was developed by a company, and somehow I thought that would be better for me.
Looking back, what a waste of time it was. The most successful blog I ever had was on blogger, and I used a super simple template. Blogger doesn’t have any categorization (only keywords). And it still didn’t matter.
For one thing, blog templates hardly ever make a difference. The best blogs have simple, easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate templates (besides, most people will read your blog through an RSS reader). Then there’s categorization. Unless you’re using a blog system instead of a proper CMS, categorization hardly ever matters too. Neither does keywords, because a Google index of your site will always do better (and bring you more hits anyways).
It also turns out that the things that matter, the free systems tend to not do so well. Commenter ID management, Comment threading, spam filtering, etc. In blogger, these things are very simple and require no effort. Google gets to figure out all the details for you.
So as of now, I’m still using MT, but that’s only out of laziness. If I had the motivation, I’d probably just move this to blogger or wordpress.com or something. It would be one less thing to worry about.