Anil Dash has put up quite an intriguing post arguing the case. Matt Mullenweg are you listening?
I’m gonna add a few more reasons to his list of reasons why it would be wise to do so, but before I do that I thought I’d tell Anil why I’m not doing that…YET…
1) I don’t know of any Six Apart family of product users that are overwhelmingly happy with the spam message filters. Akismet is still king of spam deletion. Though lately Akismet is showing cracks of vulnerability.
2) Trackbacks, I have yet to see Six Apart products reliably and consistently accept my trackbacks. This highly unfortunate and unacceptable as trackbacks are a major foundation of the blogoshere. Until you fix this, across both Typepad and Movable type, I will likely continue to be tempted yet decline your offer. UPDATE: I sent a trackback to Anil’s post and it did not immediately post to his blog. 🙁
3) The duplicate, make that often triplicate, content problems that pollute the blogosphere from Typepad are repulsive and show a complete disrespect to all members of the blogosphere. It makes it hard for me to respect Six Apart as an organization as much as I respect it’s wonderful individuals such as yourself, Andrew Anker, Mena Trott, etc. The situation is simply unacceptable creating inaccurate Technorati link counts, duplicate and even triplicate content and is blogosphere pollution, plain and simple. I met a Typepad representative at last year’s Forrester Consumer Forum and she stated that this area was “not a priority to fix”. I was dumbfounded and confused by this response. Worse, she said Six Apart was working with Technorati to come up with a fix. I’m not exactly the world’s biggest Technorati lover, but why the heck should they write a kluge in their code to fix your massive flaw in your Typepad software? That’s right, they shouldn’t spend a minute on it, they should be fixing the death of blog search. Six Apart should immediately fix this mess and show you respect user’s time by cleaning up this duplicate and triplicate content that inflates Typepad users link counts. I’ve made a note to revisit this issue on May1st, 2008.
4) Your post URL (http://www.movabletype.com/blog/2008/03/a-wordpress-25-upgrade-guide.html) is well, really kinda lame. How about dropping the .html extension on the end? I mean I know of the warm, fuzzy feelings for dot.com 1999 era, but this would be so much cleaner (and better for trackback extension convention standards).
OK, onto WordPress.
1) Anil in my opinion did a fair job in communicating the current state. In fact, many WordPress users will consider this status generous.
2) The plugin problem jumps out at me as the one that is the largest laughing stock, the continual disrespect of the user by not creating a professional backward compatible process in both themes and plugins is NOT sustainable over the long run. Anil should have ranked this issue at the top of his list in my opinion.
3) The widening feature gulf between the WordPress.com and WordPress.org (self-hosted) is becoming absolutely embarrassing and needs to be addressed. It also creates massive potential new blogger confusion as to what is what.
Alright, WordPress I love you, but that love is not blind. Anil is right you need to do much better, in fact Anil didn’t go far enough in where you need to go. My number is on the bio in my blog if Anil or Matt care to reach out about the issues I’ve raised in more detail. I will be watching your progress and wish you both good luck!
[…] So Anil Dash Wants WordPress Users to Change to Moveable Type […]
Great breakdown, David.
Thanks Ed! Coming from you that means alot.
[…] So Anil Dash Wants WordPress Users to Change to Moveable Type… […]
Great feedback, David, and I apologize for the slow response as I’ve been traveling this week. I particularly appreciate how evenhanded you’ve been.
First, I strongly agree we have a lot of work to do to make our comment and TrackBack management tools better. We are working hard on that, and will talk more about that when there’s progress to show.
I’m not sure at all what you mean by duplicate content on TypePad. If you mean that spam bloggers are taking popular blogs’ content and republishing it, that may happen, but that can happen with every platform, since they’re just republishing RSS without permission. I don’t know of anything particular to TypePad which makes that worse, and I’m not sure the context of your conversation with a member of our team, but I can’t imagine there’s an issue affecting our bloggers’ appearance in Google that we wouldn’t address. My mobile phone # is 646-541-5843 if you can explain more about that, or just drop me an email.
As best I can understand it, you’re talking specifically about Technorati, and more specifically about the method they use to determine uniqueness or sameness of blog content. Honestly, we can’t make changes to their code, so it’s not something we can address. I do note that other blog search services tend to understand domain-mapped blogs, so it must be possible to fix. It doesn’t seem to be something we could change on our end, and I can’t imagine it has any substantial impact on blog traffic.
Although I understand if it’s just the ego part of wanting to see a bigger number next to your name on Technorati, since I’m a blogger myself. 😉
I do understand some people don’t like file extensions. I do, so they’re there. That’s just personal preference, and I’m not a big fan of fetishizing URIs. MT certainly supports publishing without file extensions, and always has, and in fact lets you do things like create .asp or .php or .jsp files, which is tough to do on other platforms.
There may well be topics where I could have been more pointed in my description of WordPress; My intent was not to denigrate that platform, but to speak to what we do well. I’ll leave the criticisms to people who are members of that community and who have a vested interest in it — the feedback about what we need to do better on MT and TypePad is what has the most utility to me. I hope that helps.
Do not marry with foolishness. There may be children.
Your news is a cool stuff man, keep it going.
That’s good man, keep it going.
Stunning blog and good article. High 5 for u man !