Grand Geekery
11Mar2003 Filed under: Geek OutQuestion:
What would you think about a hosting plan that included a pre-installed version of Movable Type? As in, you could go to this site, register a new domain, sign up for hosting, and be logged into Movable Type on your own server within minutes. The ease of Blogger/BlogSpot, but with the advantages of a locally-hosted content management system, and all the powerful tools of MT. And how cool would it be if the server automatically upgraded to new versions of MT when they were released? Sort of like “pmachinehosting”:http://pmachinehosting.com, but Movable Type.
What do you think of that?
16 Responses to “Grand Geekery”
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Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
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ericalynn
March 11th, 2003 at 5:37 pm
ahh. that would make things so much simpler… but I think somewhere in the mt ‘rules of use’ it’s illegal… I could be wrong tho.
Ariel
March 11th, 2003 at 6:16 pm
Oh no, this isn’t something that would be done without MT wanting to. It would have to be a partnership between the Trotts and the hosting company.
annie
March 11th, 2003 at 7:42 pm
i’d go for it, especially to avoid having to deal with MT update changes!
why do you ask?
*b.
March 11th, 2003 at 7:50 pm
i would be the first in line.
Emily
March 11th, 2003 at 8:56 pm
The only thing is, I’d want to see a hell of a lot more MT design templates for people to choose from. If it was that easy for people to set up a new MT blog, we’d unfortunately see many more blogs of that generic template than we do now!
Glace
March 11th, 2003 at 9:06 pm
I’d be SO down with that. It was my frustrations with a MT switch that precipitated me canning the blog entirely.
8bitjoystick.com
March 11th, 2003 at 9:40 pm
Nah setting up my MT powered blog was easy and I don’t think I would want anyone else to have control and access to my MT install except my hosting company.
Dave
March 12th, 2003 at 12:03 am
I wonder what the percentage of new webpages are blog-related? Of course, as far as I’m concerned, they’re the only ones that matter… but from a business standpoint, it may need to be a large percentage for this feature to seem attractive to Joe Consumer. Just a thought…
Dave (the other one)
March 12th, 2003 at 6:48 am
Dave- more and more every day. all of the big homepage providers (aol, tripod, yahoo-geocities, etc) are planning to offer blogs this year. i think what ariel had in mind is something specifically targeted at “joe consumer” who doesnt have the technical skill or desire to install, configure and maintain an MT blog, but just wants a place to write and post pics. i think if you marketed it right, it would fly.
Emily- you’re right on target about the templates. the standard mt templates are outdated and boring. i think the assumption is that most mt users are going to redesign the site anyway. but not everyone has the skill or the time.
Cy
March 12th, 2003 at 8:06 am
I think that might encourage people to get out of LiveJournal, Diaryland, et al and try something different. Thumbs up!
Roni
March 12th, 2003 at 8:57 am
I’d get in that line…
Gen Kanai
March 12th, 2003 at 9:13 am
I would definitely pay a premium for such a hosting service. I had to go ask a bunch of people which host they recommended and I ended up going with Paul Ford’s (ftrain) recommendation. It’s been great and I don’t think that I’d move but I would definitely pay to have someone help me upgrade and whatnot.
The other issue was that I was migrating from a weblogs.com/Frontier blog and I had to get help from Jason Levine (Q Daily News) to parse my Frontier archives so that MT could import them.
I love blogging. I don’t love managing my blog.
yara
March 12th, 2003 at 10:50 am
that’d rock! i’m trying to install MT now and i’m ready to cry. a lot. often.
Broch
March 12th, 2003 at 2:15 pm
Mmmm, that would be goooood!
scully
March 13th, 2003 at 6:50 am
“all of the big homepage providers (aol, tripod, yahoo-geocities, etc) are planning to offer blogs this year.”
Ahhh, even more noise, and even less signal.
Sorry to be the naysayer, but IMHO as blogs popularity have increased their quality has decreased. Or more accurately it is harder and harder to find quality writing. Not the best analogy, but I am reminded of Jurassic Park where the one guys says that scientists were so proud that they *could* make a dinosaur that they didn’t think of whether they *should.*
Sure hope someone builds a site dedicated to cataloging all blogs then (hmmm, Bloogle) because if you think it is hard to find good stuff to read now, wait until ever single AOL user has a blog
</devil’s advocate>
Tumbleweed
March 13th, 2003 at 1:05 pm
It’s an _excellent_ idea.
I’d be wary of it, though, as it seems like most of the pre-packaged blog-hosting deals aren’t a good deal for anything _but_ blogging. They usually have very little storage space included, and/or little bandwidth, or lack other featured I’d want in a hosting plan. The hosting plan I currently have is $9.99 a month with 250meg of space, and 10GB of bandwidth. Plus it’s got an awesome set of control panels for managing the various aspects of the site. Oh, also it’s lightning fast as I think they’re in the same building as Mae-West (major west coast internet backbone). At least, their routing leads me to that belief.
I think that over the next year or so, hosting companies will be finding blogs are so requested, they’ll be putting them as a regular feature in their hosting plans, rather than making special ‘blog’ plans, but for now, you might be able to sucker a lot of newbies into getting $15 a month plans with blogs already ready to go and giving them low-storage-low-bandwidth plans.