Just a note that I’ll be attending the Dakota Blog Conference in Sioux Falls, South Dakota tomorrow. It’s at Augustana College, and should be an interesting discussion of how blogging effects the media and politics. I may live-blog what I can between sessions – although I doubt that Augie has wireless access. Hindrocket from Power Line is the keynote speaker, and the rest of the Dakota Alliance of blogs will be there.

I know, spending my birthday at a blogging conference… I believe I have achieved a new pinnacle of wonkishness…

Greetings,

Ben Domenech (bendomenech.com), Mike Krempasky (krempasky.com), and the pseudonymous blogger Tacitus (tacitus.org) are pleased to announce the launch of a new online Republican community website: Red State.

Red State will be an online rallying point for the Right. It will function as a public square where Republicans can interact, debate, and share information on a wide variety of political issues independent of the official party structure. Red State will be a gathering place of responsible voices, stimulating debate, and constructive action that fully mobilizes conservative intellectual and organizational resources to create a strong and vibrant presence in the weblog medium. Through Red State, the political blogging of the Right can gain the critical mass it needs for the battle ahead.

Red State may be found at http://www.redstate.org

I’ll be a contributor to this project, providing electoral analysis on the 2004 Presidential contest as well as the key Daschle v. Thune race in South Dakota and more. This is going to be a very interesting project, and I’m quite pleased to be a part of getting it off the ground.

I won’t have time to blog as I’m going to be moving into my new apartment today, but Steven Greene has all the linkage you’ll need. I especially recommend the Charles Krauthammer piece on why Israel has won the intifada.

Vaclav Havel also has a clarion call for action on North Korea that is well worth reading as well. Where is the UN on this?

No Michele, you weren’t the only one.

Although I’m starting to get the feeling that The Simpsons has jumped the shark – in fact, they’re performing aerial acrobatics above the shark. At least we’ll have the return of Family Guy coming soon to redeem Fox’s animated lineup…

Just as note, the only democracy in the Middle East turns 56 today. 56 years ago a group of Israeli soldiers defeated the forces of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq to secure the future of the state of Israel. Despite many subsequent efforts to destroy the state of Israel it remains as the single truly democratic state in the region, and a leader in biomedical, technological, and military research. From virtually nothing, the Israeli people have created a country that has not only weathered war, but has provided more rights to its Arab citizens than the Arab countries that surround it. Here’s to a hope for a peaceful future and a free Israel. Am Yisrael Chai!

Just as a record, here are the current problem with the MT 3.0 license for the free version…

• Anyone who runs on a server with more than one CPU must purchase MT3. This immediately makes it impossible for many uses to use MT without paying the license fee.
• Anyone who uses multiple blogs for various purposes, even if they’re only for functionality must purchase MT3 at a considerable price.
• Having "open-mike night" type events violate the terms of the license agreements.
• Guest posters would violate the license agreement.

Those are just the ones I can think of off the top of my head. Six Apart could have saved them a major PR storm if they’d put a little more thought into the licensing of their product. The original concept of a free version of MT with the current features of MT 3.0 and an MT Pro with additional features/support for corporate/power users would have been a better model – they would have gotten more money in the end than trying to raise the price on the low end. Alternately, had the new version of MT added features that would negate the need to use multiple blogs for certain common tasks, the impact of this change would have been reduced.

I were Jay Reding.com, Inc. and were using MT as a full-fledged content management system, this license wouldn’t be too bad. However, what Six Apart has done is alienated their core user base – the ones who would have easily kicked in a few bucks for a great product had they not made the licensing so untenable for personal users. As it stands, anyone who does guest posts, has a number of authors, uses multiple blogs, or has a host that uses dual-CPU machines are shut out of using MT3 without paying a license fee that is simply too much for most of their market.

UPDATE: Heal Your Church Website has a perfect pricing plan for MT 3.0. In fact, if Six Apart adopted that price point plan, I’d buy an MT 3.0 upgrade today. That price point/feature point would match that of pMachine, keep the hobbyist market from moving to WordPress, and make Six Apart more money than the current price scheme.

So, what will it be? Do you want to sell 10,000 units at $99 or 100,000 at $30? If I were at Six Apart, I’d be seriously considering changing the licensing agreements to make sure that the company didn’t undo all the excellent work they’ve done so far.

The new version of Movable Type is now out as a developer edition. I’ve been beta-testing it for weeks. It’s a great improvment over 2.661. It has some nice features.

It also costs way more money than I want to spend, and I’m not entirely sure I can use the free version.

I’m seriously considering ditching MT because of the license change. I’m not going to give up BlogAds (even though I don’t make any money off of them) for an upgrade. I’m not going to live with a piece of crippleware either.

I knew that eventually there would be a commercial version of MT, which is fine and expected. What I did not expect is that Six Apart would suddenly leave so many bloggers in the lurch like this by changing the license so suddenly. I have been recommending and singing the praises of MT for quite some time, but now I feel like I’ve been let down in a way. I understand that Six Apart has the right to license their software as they want, and they deserve to make some money off of it. However, I’m not going to give up the features of my site, and there’s no way I can afford the license fees they’re asking for.

So here’s my quandry. Theoretically I could use MT3.0, and probably keep my BlogAds as well since they’re ancillary to the site and I’m not using them for commercial purposes, and there’s a clause in the MT license that reads:

Affiliate or associate fees that are earned by a personal blog site and are payable to a single individual and that are earned through activities incidental to the main purpose of the site are permitted under the Non-Commercial Purposes of this Agreement.

That may cover my current site organization and allow me to use MT3.0 – until I start adding authors and/or blogs. Granted, maybe I’ll never use that functionality, but I’d rather have the option of having it there nevertheless.

The other option is to migrate the site to WordPress or Drupal. Both are open-source and won’t be pulling a sudden license change. However, I’m not so sure they’re significantly scalable to meet the demands of this site. Since being repeatedly Instalanched over the last few weeks my traffic is running significantly higher than it was. The beauty of MT is that each page doesn’t make a call to the database but rather rebuilds a static page – meaning that a large site like this won’t overload the server with database calls. It also makes it easier for later adding dynamic content.

Preferably I’d like to see the blogging commuinity come together and create a new open-source blogging system that has the features of MT but will remain forever free for non-commercial use. Hell, I’d even volunteer to help out.

So, for the time being, this site will remain with MT 2.6 until I either decide to migrate over to MT 3.0 and accept the crippleware license or find a tool that meets my needs, or a replacement tool comes up that offers an easy upgrade path from MT and uses static rather than dynamic pages.

As always, any pointers would be appreciated.

I just looked through the new redesign of Blogger, and I am quite impressed. The UI is incredible, it’s fully CSS compliant, and it has some excellent new templates by some of the best web designers out there, such as Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Rubin. Overall, I have to admit that the new redesign really enhances Blogger.

The redesign was spearheaded by Doug Bowman and Adaptive Path, and they certainly did an excellent job of it.

Of course, just wait until Movable Type 3.0 comes out…

There’s an interesting new meme going around, listing important books you’ve read. Since I’ve nothing better to do while I wait for the Specter/Toomey race result, here we go:

Continue reading “A Literate Meme” →