David’s finally online
Looks like my boss finally caught the blogging bug (rss).
He got .Text up and running and is now trying to convince me to put away MovableType. I’m not totally sure about that yet.
Anyways, give him a read. He’s going to be talking mostly about software and motorcycles.
Things that Ive seen from looking at the .Text admin with David:
* Side panels are done via ascx (web user controls) and you have a page layout that you define. This is similar to the way MovableType handles module templates.
* Quick links (ie: he has it set up so that any time he types in Matt Berther, it automatically links it to http://www.mattberther.com). You can set up any number of these.
* Referrer and link tracking. The admin tools allow you to see who is referring you and who you are linking to.
* Image galleries.
* The posting interface built into the tool is far superior to the MT interface. .Text uses the FreeTextbox control, so you have significantly more formatting capabilities built in, as well as spell checking via IESpell.
* Article support. This is semi-handled with MovableType and extended entries, however, this separation in .Text seems a lot cleaner.
Like you, I’ve thought about moving this over to .Text, however, I think that I’ll end up losing a lot of the extensibility that MovableType provides via its plugin architecture. .Text is also obviously beta, whereas MT has been around for a significant amount of time and has matured to the point where a lot of the kinks have been worked out.
MovableType also lets you determine the format of your Urls, whereas with .Text, I believe everything is done via querystring (not very google friendly).
The other thing Im looking at is migrating all these posts over, and Im not really sure there is a tool available to do that, which is probably the dealbreaker for me…

I’ve thought about this myself a bit (MT vs. .Text), and while I’ve never used .Text, the one advantage it has over MT, for me at least, is that it’s written using .NET. Now, assuming that I go and get some .NET hosting (which is something that I’ve been thinking about doing more and more lately), I might just give it a try. I don’t know what it’s like feature-wise when compared to MT, though.