Life as an Artificial Lifeform

Years ago I decided that I wanted to have a real blog after doing some "offline blogging" with .mac and an application whos name I have forgotten. Back in the internet eons there was only ONE viable platform to do blogging and that was Movable Type. It was great and did what you wanted. Until the spam invasion came and a big gaping hole became apparent - the lack of anti spam technology in the movable type core. The plugin engine was too weak and the "fixes" available not good enough. Then SixApart - the "company" group of people who programmed movable type made a big "nono" in the free internet and made the once for free blogging software available only if you pay them hefty money - the problem was to make any use of your comment function you better upgraded - or switched. At that time the comment spamming took levels never seen before.
So at that time my movable type installation hosted six blogs and a couple of secret personal ones. It was a do or die decission. The only viable other option was of course WordPress but at the time there was no converter available that easely would have converted the 2000+ messages on these blogs into its own format. So the decision went to go with a "noncommercial" "cheap" license from Six Apart - with a lot of teeth grinding. I learned to live with the decission and am still quite happy with Movable Type.
Now 4 years later it seems - in a rare moment of luck - the patience and all the ground teeth might pay off. Six Apart has announced Movable Type 4beta. First of all its going to be Open Source if it will be available for free they don´t say (one is NOT the other) but my guess is they might as SixAparts main income seems to come from support and from their LiveJorunal, vox, typepad services these days and I guess the actual salesprice of MT is not such a big thing on their endbill - but I could be wrong I have not found information on this on their site.
Anyway the opensource thing is good for plug ins and that brings us to the next big development - widgets as "easy writable plugins" - say "write a Quicktime Uploader" in under 5 minutes and I am sooooo sold as EVERY OTHER BLOG APP OUT THERE does not have this or if it has it the usage is very restricted to "special pages burried under a load of internet tubes".
But this does not stop it because they will include all features of LiveJournal, TypePad and the multimedia (ah so 90s) VOX service. This is great - because if you ever tried to publish mp3s, videos in various formats and other type of documents on the same blog you should have an MA in programming and then your content will very likely look crap because you had too much programming to do to take care of the content.
A new template language that listens to real world booleans "Do not show me posts by "AppleBasher101" in category "microsoft" - yes thats a valid template. Oh and you can use templates to publish single pages - making this not a blogging software anymore but a light CMS system.

All new features can be found here.

I will install a test version on a test site soon and will probably write something about it at one point.

You can test out the beta yourself if you head over to www.movabletype.org