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January 2, 2005

Happy Birthday, Learning Movable Type!

A year ago this week, trying to keep track of everything I was learning regarding using Movable Type, I wrote my first MT tutorial and launched Learning Movable Type. Stung by comments in the forums to RTFM (read the f%$#ng manual), exasperated that the manual - while thorough - seemed to be written in some foreign geek language understandable only to those who could probably write code in their sleep, and determined that other newbies and non-techies would not suffer the tens and hundreds of hours of lost productivity pulling their collective hairs out over trying to get some dang thing on their MT blog to work, I got to writing.

It must be clear to most technically savvy people who have read some of the tutorials I've written here on LMT that I really do not know what I'm doing. Thank goodness I've never let that stop me. Recalling years of university classes in option pricing models, astrophysics, econometrics, chemistry, decision sciences, etc. I learned long ago that pretty much everything that appears to be obtusely complex can be explained in a way that can be understood by most. You don't have to be a rocket scientist, or even a web designer, to use Movable Type.

This is what I have attempted to do this year with the tutorials in Learning Movable Type. I hope that if you have used one of the tutorials, you found it useful and it helped you be more productive with your Movable Type blog.

I thank everyone who has offered corrections (especially those who do so nicely and don't call me an idiot), suggestions, and alternatives through email or through comments. I thank fellow LMT authors Sarah Hughes and Arvind Satyanarayan for the generosity of allowing me to post their tutorials. Arvind (www.movalog.com) has been especially generous with his time and patience, explaining and re-explaining technical aspects of MT as we have co-written several tutorials. Brad Choate and Anil Dash of Six Apart have also been helpful, as have members of the 6A ProNet community and all of the contributors to the MT forums.

With 90 or so tutorials written this last year, at an average of 4 or 5 hours to write, many hours to research the methods, refine the tutorials, and respond to comments, I've put in close to, if not more than, a thousand hours this year on the project. Obsessive? Yes. Sustainable? No. Yet the need for more simple documentation persists, especially in the areas of installation, subcategories, moblogging, and design. If you have authored a tutorial that you think would be helpful to LMT readers and would like to post it on this site, please let me know.

Happy New Year to all!

Posted by elise on January 2, 2005 to Announcements | Email to a friend | Comments(11) | Printer-friendly version

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