I was looking for a review on the newer version of Movable Type, trying to make up my mind about whether to upgrade my own blog software, and I found a wonderful review of MT 3.0 at Neil’s World and though it described version 3.0 (and is dated) I’m pretty much convinced. I wish I’d done this a while back. I was skeptical about it, especially because I didn’t want to have to delete one of the blogs I run (I have 4 right now, one of them a private notebook and the other three public) but since I’ve decided to delete my Korean blog and import the contents into my English blog, I’m not so worried about that anymore.

The only thing that has me questioning this move was an idea I had with my girlfriend. She and I were talking about running a dual blog, in the languages in which we’re working on improving our skills. I was going to write in Korean, and I offered her a sidebar to write in English. It could be amusing, correcting one another and also just posting side by side. In fact, I think it’s a great idea, but the problem is: if I update my MT Installation, suddenly that becomes impossible. Once you install MT 3.1, you’re stuck with only one author per domain/installation. That kind of sucks. No, wait, that really sucks.

So maybe I’d be wiser going over to WordPress and redoing the whole damned thing? Except that I don’t think I’ll be doing that anytime soon. Who has time? The semester’s underway, and commitments are kicking in left, right, and center with me signed up for some extra work at a local high school (it’s a total $1500 for a few hours a week all semester). Between that, writing, and the band, I’m not sure I’ll be up to doing a full redesign of my site. Hmm. I wonder if I can install WordPress alongside MT and tinker as I go, and then just port? Wouldn’t that be a little less stressful? Hmmm.

Maybe I’ll just do nothing but tinker with my current template. But all those nice category options would be good. I think. I’d better find out how they work before I upgrade, I may not be getting any solutions to the problems I’m hacking my way through anyway.

UPDATE: 5 Sept, 2004. TOO MUCH INFORMATION. It’s bad for you, sometimes. Well, I’ve been put off WordPress for now, for a couple of reasons, mainly, I think, because to do what I can do with MT right now would require climbing up yet another learning curve. To be honest, right now, I would rather be studying Korean, or working on my writing, instead of developing all kinds of neat little functions for my site. I don’t mind doing a template upgrade sometimes; that’s good, satisfying, a break from other things, but learning PHP right now isn’t appealing. Maybe next winter holiday, if I don’t have a novel in the hopper. (Though I probably will.)

Meanwhile, I don’t want to upgrade my MT license right now; I appreciate that it’s free, and I also appreciate I could run MT 3.1 free if I were willing to being the only author on my blog. I also know that if I really wanted to run a multilingual “studies” blog with Lime, we could do it all via blogger and just have it hosted on my site, or even my blogspot. But there’s something unsatisfying about that, too.

I think for now I’ll see if I can’t hack together a solution in MT for the categories problem I’m dealing with. I think I can. If that fails, I may upgrade the account using the educational pricing (I am, after all, a professor, which cuts it down to US$40) in order to add any new author accounts I want to add to my blog. The one thing I wish is that I could test out the new MT interface and features myself instead of just guessing whether the upgrade would be worth it. Hmmm.