I started this weblog last year, because I wanted a place where I could publish my thoughts and analysis on various topics related to my interests, hobbies and profession. I chose to use Radio Userland as my blogging tool because of my familarity with Dave Winer and his earlier product Frontier. But I quickly discovered that Radio outputs the worst sort of tag soup HTML that you could imagine, and as a web standards advocate, that would never do. Since I knew how to program in UserTalk, Radio’s underlying scripting language, I had thought that if I had the time, I could correct Radio’s output so that it would conform to the current W3C web publishing standards.
Well, I don’t have the time to fix Radio’s problems, and Userland doesn’t seem to be particularly interested in fixing them either. Life’s too short to sit around waiting for something like this to get fixed, so I’m switching to another tool, Movable Type. Why MT? Because I recently attended a web development conference, and “everyone” there who published a weblog was using Movable Type. So I checked it out and found that it seems to do everything I need, it outputs standards-compliant code, and the copy behind it, Six Apart, seems to actually care about the product and support it.
So, so long Radio Userland, hello Movable Type. My first project will be to import my old Radio posting in to MT. We’ll see how it goes…