This blog runs on Movable Type. In its history, it's also been run on Xoops and Post Nuke. Before it was anything like a blog, it was just a hand coded (DreamWeaver and Notepad mostly) web page with information about our wedding (directions, etc for guests that could make it, pictures for those that couldn't). I made the switch to Movable Type sometime in 2003, I think and haven't really spent any time thinking about moving it again since.
I am a Lotus Domino professional (certified and some would say certifiable), so some people find it odd that I'm not using the Dominoblog template or the newly released IBM Blog template. I was asked that a few times from people at Lotusphere 2006 about that as well. At the time, I hadn't really considered a move and hadn't played around with the Dominoblog template.
I've been thinking about it more recently, and below I'm listing the barriers that I currently have for making the move. I only have a couple hours worth of time invested in messing with the Dominoblog template so far and none with the 7.0.2 template. There's a lot that I like about the template, and I'll drop that in another post after I have more time to play.
Cheap Hosting:
At the time that I was shopping around for a a host for my site (2001 sometime), I was considering Domino-based hosting providers. Most of the ones that I found had free options that were insufficient. I'm currently using about 80MB of space for my site between the content directories and the database. I don't get enough traffic to worry about hitting the limit in most hosting arrangements.
Importing of content from MovaleType:
In the past, I hadn't really worried about losing content on the site when moving platforms. The amount of actual content was pretty light. In the past year or so, it's picked up a lot, and I kinda care about the old stuff now. Anything I move to in the future must be able to import the Movable Type data that I already have. Probably doesn't really have to be Movable Type specific, if I can point it at an RSS/ATOM feed that has everything on the site, then import that.
Trackbacks
I've been fiddling around with the Dominoblog 3.0.2 template, and I don't see how/if trackbacks actually work. I haven't seen any Dominoblog based blogs that accept trackbacks. I'm wondering if that's a trackback spam thing or not. A robust anti-spam configuration is a must. I've been plugged into Akismet for my blog for a while and it's a beautiful thing.
Technorati Tags: Blogging, Domino, Lotus, Technology
Trackbacks were removed out of the 7.0.2 blog template. I have been using DominoBlog for almost 3 year and have never had the desire to turn trackbacks on. The Blogsphere template might also have a solution for trackbacks, but you will have to check on OpenNTF to find out.
A couple of things that you will get with a Domino based blog that you can't get any place else are off-line capabilities and the ability to code your own back end agents to do some cool stuff. The DominoBlog template has first rate comment spam filtering and you can configure it for the most part without a designer client.
As far as hosting goes, check with a couple of the hosting companies out there and you might be surprised at the cost for hosting a domino centric blog.
Sean---
Trackbacks are one of those things that I don't use a lot but I like to know that they're there. I'd use them a lot more if more of the Domino-related blogs accepted them though. There's a lot of comments that I have to some of the stuff that goes on that might be better served with a posting here instead of just a comment somewhere, but it's no good if you can't easily link the posts together. I'm not interested in traffic generation as much as I am getting a conversation out there.
I use ecto so I have offline capability too, actually. I write a post, config it and then sync up with the server when I want. I'm also not a developer (PCLP Domino Admin...I gotta work on that About page), so the codability doesn't really appeal to me as much...until someone figures out a way to make an easy code bin for it. If I come up with something I'd like to do, I'm a lot more likely to wait for someone to do it right than to try to make a mess of it myself.
I'll admit that I haven't looked at hosting much lately. I didn't mention it in the post, but I'm aware that Connectria does some free blog hosting, but I haven't asked about what the size limits are for that. I probably should.
I'm still going to post something about the things that attract me to Dominoblog as a potential blogging platform. The statistics section looks fantastic. I like the detailed controls available for the posts themselves. I'm seeing more stuff I like as I spend time playing around with it.
I've thought about this some as well since I'm a blogger user. I setup a domino blog once on a pc at home and was accessing it over my cable modem. It was alright.
My biggest hesitation about converting is that blogger has a really reliable uptime. Since I wouldn't plan on paying anyone to host it, I wouldn't want to host it all on a pc at home on a cable modem connection! :)
The migration of posts may not be too big of a deal since I can get a single html file with all of my posts from blogger. Then I could parse through that to create Domino documents if I needed to.
I can dump all of my content to something formatted in Movable Type too. I don't think it would be too hard to mod the RSS feed template to have it give up everything in the system. The hard part for me is the importing into the Domino template...I'm comfortable tinkering around in Designer but to the extent of taking in a lot of data and modding the format and creating docs with it.
As for the hosting, it's just part of the priorities that I've had since I started this site. I should have mentioned in the posting that I'm paying about $5/month to keep this site running. I get 1.2G of space that I can put anything on...it was important from the beginning that I be able to put whatever up on the site that I wanted. The site was going to be a bit of a web dev test platform for me originally as well as hosting a little personal site.
$60 a year has given me a lot of flexibility and freedom to do this thing my way.