In an article on xml.com, the Kendall Grant Clark notes that:
… the LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, [Perl, Python, PHP]) crowd has not yet bought into the animating ideas of the Semantic Web.
While true, this is a little like observing that the United States has not yet bought into the animating idea of declaring Esperanto the national language.
On the other hand, I do see the odd discussion of the semantic web amongst the Javablogs crowd.
Got an email from a friend who is thinking of starting a blog. He has some reservations about it, and also asked about Movable Type. Here is my reply:
Blogs are good for some things – diaries, opinions, short articles. What they are particularly bad at is letting you develop a piece of writing over a period of time. That said, I am sure you will enjoy blogging, and I’m equally sure I’ll enjoy reading it.
Moveable Type is OK. From what I understand, it represents the state of the art for pure server-side blogware. ‘tis lightweight and easy to set up in a wide range of environments.
Installation was simple once I wrapped my head around how MT works: it stores all the information in the database, but when you publish, it generates flat html files into your www directory. phpwebhosting have all the tools you need (actually, just perl) to make it work.
The only problem I have ever had with it is corruption in the BerkelyDB database. I lost 80% of my blogs comments. I have since moved to the MySQL backend and have had no further issues.