Now that the whole Movable Type controversy rages all around the blogosphere, I, like many others, decided to switch to a new weblog platform. Only I didn't use Movable Type and I didn't switch to WordPress. I used my own Emacsy hack and I switched to NewsBruiser. Being some sort of a Python advocate, NewsBruiser is a natural candidate since it's written in Python. So was my own hack, but you cannot beat years of active development and the pressure of demanding users. My own hack had neither of those.

I emphasize that the implementation language of NewsBruiser is not, by far, its most important feature. Compared to my own hack, the main difference is that NewsBruiser has features. Compared to other weblogging platforms, well, it's comparable almost at any perspective.

Most important feature is, however, that NewsBruiser is really easy to install. All I did was to drop the distribution at my web site's directory and point my browser to a URL. I filled in couple of details and I was basically done. (Well, I've been tweaking ever since, but, hey, I'm a tweaker.) Compare this to the comment someone made on Daily Sucker:

That brings me to Moveable Type and the controversy surrounding their new pricing scheme. Apparently, their new pricing has caused an uproar in the MT user community (obviously, they're charging more than they were). People keep throwing figures around -- $700, $535, etc. Anything they're charging that's more than zero is too much. I couldn't install it. I had to have someone with an M.S. in Computer Science install a test copy.

Might not be all fair, but people like me, ie. people that cannot be bothered to read manuals until they really need it, tend to ditch software that aren't straight-forward to install and use.

If you need to get away from Movable Type, because its pricing or whatever, consider NewsBruiser. It supports multiple weblogs and multiple authors and loads of other things. I dig.

And, yeah, NewsBruiser is free and has a pretty understandable and field-proven license, unlike some others.