Red Herring Alert

I just got a Google alert for a Red Herring article on Six Apart set to publish in a few days. They mention us here: “Critics of Six Apart say that WordPress, a blog publishing platform developed by a grassroots team, is more robust than Movable Type. WordPress is also open source and free. But things are different in Six Apart’s cash-crop enterprise space, where support and security are at the top of the list. Half of Movable Type servers sit behind a firewall, says Mr. Berkowitz.”

18 thoughts on “Red Herring Alert

  1. That reads as almost propaganda to me .. “The blog’s biggest trackback influx came last year when the company changed its pricing model for Movable Type.” No mention there of the reason. I’ll bet Kim Jong-il gets less fawning from his own press !

  2. “Half of Movable Type servers sit behind a firewall, says Mr. Berkowitz.”

    HAHAHAHAHA. A FIREWALL! Noooooo….

  3. Wow, that really sad. SA had 2.5 million users pre-dating the LJ acquisition? I find that highly unlikely especially with the mass exodus we have been seeing since the License announcement.

    Downloads != users that’s all I know.

  4. Google Alerts?!?! You mean these HTML-formatted E-mails one occasionally gets? Use cron jobs to keep track of Google (search for John Bokma) or RSS Google (Ben Hammersley).

  5. WordPress is more robust? Hmm, how about more stable – I’ve never seen a WordPress script run wild and crash an entire server, whereas it happens all the time with MT. In fact, it happened so much at Surpass Hosting, they’ve all but forbade the use of MT (basically you can install it and chance that it won’t crash the server, but if it does you’d have to remove it). And the most amusing part of that, SA can’t figure out why because it’s never the same script that does it.

  6. I’m with Surpass, I am not sure the rules still apply. I remember there was once this rule that just keeps on getting repeated in their forums. I didn’t MT but I believed that I found something better – WordPress. WP uses PHP and won’t crash like the way MT does. I don’t see why the firewall thing is brought up… It seemed irrelevant. WordPress and SA are going different directions. SA is offering more of a blogging service and WP offers more of a software. You can always put WP behind a firewall, can’t you?

  7. WP is free and really embraces the open source “feeling”. That’s why I chose WP as opposed to MT. WP has an awesome development community and I enjoy taking part in that community every now and then. WordPress makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside basically. 🙂

  8. I think the article means that around half of MT installations are on intranets (i.e. not accessible from the internet at large), not that half of installations are on unsecured servers.

  9. Jeez, what’s next? “We consulted our good friend Jesus Christ for usability testing with MT3.”

    I think the biggest difference in WP vs MT is that WP is open source.

  10. WP uses PHP and won’t crash like the way MT does.

    Mr. Dew, what does that have to do with anything? Code is only as good as the programmer behind the code. If he knows what he’s doing everything will work fine. If not, more study is required.

    I’m in the middle of Perl training out here in Boulder, CO, learning under Tom Christiansen. I’ve never come across a more brilliant or practical programmer in my life. I think he might have a differing opinion than you on the whole PHP versus Perl issue you seem to be raising.

    BTW, if you don’t know who Tom Christiansen is go to your local bookstore and check the authors on the books Programming Perl and Perl Cookbook.

  11. I’m not quite sure if the 900 trackbacks referred to include the spams on MT or not 🙂
    Personally I think the WP vs MT is becoming a bit like unix vs windows OS argument. Both platforms have their merits depending on the job in hand. dismissing perl or php as buggy is irrelevant – its the programmer that causes the bugs

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