When I started blogging almost ten years ago, there were hosted services like LiveJournal and there was Movable Type. MT was the king of the hill as far as features and mindshare went; it found its way into most hosting accounts and it became ubiquitous.

When I moved to Media Temple I did so in part because my account could include, for a paltry $5 extra per month, a Movable Type installation. For several years my sites ran on MT, and I cursed it constantly. Nothing was easy; almost any plugin (if you can call them that) required template edits by hand. Linking templates to files meant static content finding its way into my carefully redesigned pages. When my domains were hacked about three weeks ago, all of these factors compounded to make recovery almost impossible. All my domains, even the minor ones, had been severely compromised and would need endless handwork—even with backups—to work again because of the draconian way you do everything in MT.

Yesterday I started to read a little bit about WordPress, a CMS package that I had been brainwashed to think was “oversimplified” and “childish”. I, after all, was used to having to do sitewide rebuilds after changing errant punctuation with MT. I was a power user! But somewhere I saw a screenshot of nothing more than the WordPress login page. I understood then what I had been missing. WP was to MT what OS X is to Windows Vista. Endless simple customization, powerful editing, no rebuilds, a common-sense template engine. I’ve been all over the system and I’ve not seen a single table yet. WP is semantic, easy and rewarding. MT, on the other hand, was the only piece of software in 14 years of computer use that still made me bang my hands on my desk in frustration.

WordPress has made blogging an immersive experience again, not something I do rarely and with trepidation. Besides, I have to blog just to see the admin interface and all its Ajaxified goodness.

The set up—including creating a user and moving my MT database—took about half an hour thanks to Media Temple’s “One Click Apps”. I’m thinking that even on a non-managed machine this would be a trivial, forty-five minute thing. If you’re languishing in MT hell, or still use Blogger or another managed system I urge you to convert. If you’re half as glad as I am you’ll be dancing in the aisles.