Wondering about blogging, leery of using Blogger, unwilling to wait for TypePad, but daunted by Movable Type? Check out this tutorial, which goes through the whole process, step by step. Sweet.
(via InstaPundit)
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MT Blogging for Dummies
Wondering about blogging, leery of using Blogger, unwilling to wait for TypePad, but daunted by Movable Type? Check out this tutorial, which goes through the whole process, step by step….
That’s a nice primer. But the sticking point especially for non-techies, “Install Movable Type,” only gets about three paragraphs. Reminds me of the Steve Martin bit where he was going to teach you how to be a millionaire:
Step One: Get a million dollars.
Hrm. Yeah. I didn’t look over that part too carefully, and, yeah, it’s the real sticking point with a lot of potential MT users. Heck, it kept me away (for a while), though once I’d had a gander at the Greymatter instructions, MT seemed pretty easy.
Which, in turn, reminds me of my favorite New Yorker cartoon.
Fair enough.
When I first set up my blog, installing MT was beyond my ability. For someone who really knows nothing about cgi, perl, mysql, setting permissions, I thought is was too much to bite off. For me it was. That’s why I instruct beginners to part with $40 and have MT install the software for them.
I know that a few people have come to my tutorial looking for simple MT installation instructions. Unfortunately, I can’t offer that nor have I found any simplified instructions anywhere else. If anyone has written simple instructions I will gladly include them (with credit) or link to them. Or, if anyone has any other suggestions?
Spoke too soon. Someone sent me this link:
http://www.emptypages.org/more/tips/installation.html?search=install
Anyone have thoughts on this?
Hmmm. Good stuff there, filling in some of the MT install doc gaps, but still not for the faint of heart. I agree that it’s probably worth the bucks to have someone do it for you, if you’re too scared of the process — but I suspect that for $40, most folks will probably want to go the TypePad route, or else stay with a “free” service. Which is a shame.
I don’t necessarily critique the Trotts on this, by the way. Dealing with UNIX systems is an arcane science even with the friendliest of installations. To make the MT install docs as complete as they could be would require probably tripling their size — which, in turn, would still scare off people.