Stardate 20030605.1506

(On Screen): The trickle is becoming a flood. Site after site has gotten fed up with Blogger and switched to something else. The latest site I've noticed making the move is Chicago Boyz, but they're far from the only ones.

Blogger is like training wheels on a cheap bicycle; it's a good place to start if you aren't sure if you're serious about blogging. But once you find that you intend to stick with it, hie thee away from Blogger as fast as you can run, for it will surely eventually screw you royal if you don't. Chicago Boy Jonathon says that they just lost their entire archive, more than 18 months worth of posts, when Blogger did an upgrade last night. Maybe they'll get them back, if they're lucky.

The reason that can happen is because everything you post is stored on Blogger's server. You don't have any kind of local copy of it. And if Blogger is down, you can't do jack.

That was the big reason I never used Blogger, even from the very first. I never wanted to be at the mercy of anyone else's server. Initially I just created HTML using FrontPage; then I switched to Greymatter. When that ended up being overwhelmed by my volume (Noah didn't really design it for someone who writes as much as I do) I ended up switching to CityDesk. But all along, my basic goal was to use tools where I, the worker, totally controlled the means of production.

Blogging communist, I am. (You always suspected that, deep down, didn't you?)

Actually more like blogging fat-cat industrialist. I went Cadillac. I bought my own server two years ago ($1400, plus about $150 for 512M of RAM) and I pay for my own bandwidth (about $150 per month). I bought my own tools. Greymatter was free, but I gave Noah a contribution. With Citydesk I bought a full unlimited license. But not everyone has to spend the kind of money I decided to spend in order to get a satisfactory solution for their own needs.

I like CityDesk and I have every intention of continuing to use it for this site, especially now that the 2.0 upgrade is coming soon. (And when it does, I'll be able to put "next entry, last entry" links in the individual archive files.)

For me, by far the biggest advantage of CityDesk is that it has a WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") mode for text entry. Using it is a lot like using a cut-down version of FrontPage; I can switch back and forth between a normal rendered view of the page and a literal look at the underlying HTML code. That's something I won't give up. I create italics by sweep-highlighting text and pressing Control-I. I create a link by sweep-highlighting text and pressing a button, and entering the URL in a field in the popup window. That's a significant convenience; I got fed up with directly entering formatting commands in HTML when I was using Greymatter, let along reading it and trying to imagine what it would look like. (This was easily the most painful post to enter with Greymatter I ever wrote because of all the tiny segments of boldface I had to use.)

With CityDesk, I also control the size of the entry window, which is a non-trivial advantage. And it has a built-in spelling checker.

Since it's running locally on my computer, CityDesk responds rapidly and I'm not at the mercy of the Internet when I'm doing article composition. But all of these things are only possible because CityDesk is actually a Windows program running locally on my workstation. For instance, CityDesk is using Internet Explorer's HTML renderer, which is also a DLL on Windows which IE itself uses and applications can also use. (Eudora also uses it, to render HTML-encoded mail messages.)

But CityDesk isn't for everyone, and a lot of people have settled on Movable Type as the tool of choice.

I suspect there are two reasons why Movable Type has become so popular: it's free (though if you use it heavily you really ought to make a donation to the people who have put so much work into it), and because it's server-side it's nice for collaborative blogs and for people who update from multiple locations.

Relative to CityDesk, the biggest disadvantage is that the user interface is much less convenient, since with Movable Type you're working through a browser and there are distinct limits to what is possible that way. When you're entering text you have to deal with HTML directly; you can't see it formatted as you're writing.

And it runs on the server's CPU. (So in my case, CityDesk runs as native compiled code on one of the two 2.4 GHz Xeons in my workstation, whereas Movable Type would be running interpretively on the 300 MHz K6-2 in my server.)

But for both CityDesk and Movable Type, the biggest advantages over Blogger are reliability and backup.

In both of those categories, Citydesk cannot be beaten. I have never lost a post I've written using Citydesk, in a year and a half. It has never crashed on me or