We're moving to Movable Type 4.0

When all of the many bugs get worked out, the vast Los Angeles Daily News/Los Angeles Newspaper Group blogging empire, home of Inside USC and lots of other blogs that for the most part don't do anywhere near as well, will be moving from Movable Type 3.2 to the 4.0 platform.

Who else uses MT 4.0? Why, I'm glad you asked. BoingBoing recently moved its operations to MT 4.0. I didn't think they could do it, but the whole thing, with tons of archives is now in MT land. That says a lot about the platform, I think.

I say "I think," because I suspect that WordPress has probably surpassed Movable Type in terms of functionality, and for me, I prefer Blogger, on which I can zap out entries much faster because the database structure of the Blogger platform (and WordPress as well) doesn't require blogs to be "rebuilt," ever. They are built on the fly as people click on the various URLs. For the blogger, that means nearly instant saves and less pain when features or templates are upgraded and changed.

But I will be giving Movable Type 4.0 a chance. For one thing, we have a very complex setup here, with probably somewhere around 100 blogs, many of them intertwined, with entries appearing in more than one place.

I don't need to tell you, over 500 entries later on this blog alone, that I believe in the whole idea of blogging as one of the best ways to present content on the Internet. It's the most human -- from the point of view of both reader and writer -- that I've seen. That's why this is so important.

Anyway, back to the technology. One thing we are getting, at some point in the near future, is word verification -- more popularly known as captchas -- for commenters, meaning all this TypeKey stuff should go away, and commenters will be able to participate with nothing more than typing in a squiggly word.

And the best part is that the IP block on the server, which seems to be shutting out half of Click's regular readers, will be removed.

And since comments have gone from many to ... none since we put the Typekey authentication into service, it'll be nice to hear from readers again.