I really like Movable Type, and have been a fairly active proponent of it. It certainly has its drawbacks, though, not the least of which is that it is very intimidating to set up. But hey, you can’t beat the price–it’s free.
Enter TypePad. This is a hosted Movable Type service, sort of (technically the back-end is a little different from MT). It looks very nice, and it seems clear that the Six Apart people have done a lot of polishing and tweaking to make the user interface and the default blog templates just that much better than what comes with the current version of MT (which are already good). So that solves the difficult set-up problem, but the trade-off is that you pay for it. They’re offering three tiers of service, and it is interesting that they are tying price to user sophistication. That is, the more control you want, the more you must pay.
This strikes me as a misstep, though a minor one. I don’t understand how the ability to manually edit a template (for instance) would actually raise costs, except perhaps for support (and I have no idea how that’ll work)–what should really matter would be storage space, bandwidth usage, things that really impose costs at the back end. I can imagine a non-technical user who wants to use TypePad as a photo album–which would require one of the more expensive accounts–but who would have no desire for the more extensive tweakability that came with it. By the same token, a more sophisticated user with modest server needs would pay for resources that would go unused.
Nevertheless, for people who are sick of Blogger.com (or don’t want to get started there) but don’t want to get their hands dirty with MT, TypePad looks very nice indeed. Some of the handsomest blogs (with the best markup) on the web right now were built using default TypePad templates.
Six Apart people have done a lot of polishing and tweaking to make the user interface and the default blog templates just that much better than what comes with the current version of MT (which are already good).
Ohhh, now you’ve done it, you’ve stepped on a pet peeve. The default MT templates, are, in fact, inexcusably bad. Bad color choices, poor contrast, bad device independence, small text, hard to read.
When I first setup my blog using the MT defaults, I received a quick reply from a vision impaired friend. He told me: congratulations on the new weblog, pity he couldn’t read it.
Inexcusably bad? I disagree. The HTML validates and is pretty optimal and semantically correct. (TypePad HTML is even more nearly optimal and semantically correct). Bad device independence? I don’t see it.
The default stylesheet deserves tweaking, but that’s easy to do; they provide several drop-in alternatives, and other people make theirs available. If someone has vision problems, he can set his browser to override document-supplied styles.
The table-heavy tag-soup templates (some aspects of which are outside user control) used in Radio, now those are bad. Blogger’s a little better, but not much.
Does TypePad make it easy to move a blog to MT if a user decides to go that route?
Prentiss-I don’t know for sure, but I’d be very surprised if they didn’t include their text-export format with TypePad (which MT could directly import).
We do offer a full export function for TypePad, which can be imported into MT.