Business Blog Consulting has a good review of the Grey Matter Blog Publishing platform that is really worth a read if you’re thinking through which is the best blogging platform for you. Rick describes Grey Matter in this way:

“It’s a server-side, PERL-based platform, like Movable Type, which means, among other things, it requires rebuilds of the archives when you make significant changes to the templates. Joni tells how this process early on crashed her then mom-and-pop web host’s servers and she was polited asked to take her web site elsewhere. (Bad blogger! Yikes!) Also, GreyMatter is no longer being actively developed by its principal developer, although there remains an active, die-hard community of plug-in and hack makers. It is also not so easy to install for novices. For those reasons, Joni suggests it’s better for those who like playing around with the underside of the tools and maybe not ideal for most corporate blog installations.”


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Tools like those Nokia and Six Apart are developing for moblogging will be very useful for pro-bloggers in the future. The technology is constantly improving to allow updating your blog from virtually anywhere.

Last week, Nokia announced a collaboration with California-based Six Apart to bring the personal blogging experience to a new level early next year.’

Read more at Nokia pioneers cellphone blogging

Creating a blog with Moveable Type – A beginners guide is one of the best MT tutorials I’ve ever seen. Seriously – it is so simply set out that even I can understand it.

PART I
- Introduction
- About Movable Type
- About blogs
- Blog components
- Getting started

PART II
6 Steps to setup a blog:
1. Find a host
2. Register a domain name
3. Get FTP
4. Install Movable Type
5. Configure your blog
6. Customize templates

PART III
- Using Movable Type
- Other tips
- Resources

Not only is it very informative tutorial – but it is also beautifully designed – very clean and well laid out. I highly recommend it if you’re trying to get your head around Moveable Type.

Ever wanted to make your blog more accessible to people of other languages? I havn’t done it yet – but here is a link on How to set your blog up for Machine Translation Looks like it might be reasonably easy to do.

Dave Pollard writes some great Blog Tips – here is another good one on Understanding Trackback.

‘Trackback simply lets another site know that you have a post referring to it on your own site. Read the previous sentence until it makes sense.’

In the last blog tip we talked about how comments are one way to increase the interactivity of a blog.

Of course not everyone agrees that comments are the way to go. Each to their own.

Having harped on about comments I should also say that there are many other ways to make your blog more interactive.

Interactive Blog Tools

- chat, rooms || Newsletters/mailing Lists || Guest Maps || forums || discussion boards || trackback || Polls (and another) || guest book || Chat Boards

In addition to these tools you might want to consider making yourself contactable by posting your email address – beware of spam if you post it as a link. One way around this is to have a Contact Form. You might also post your instant messenger ID (but again be aware this means you might get anyone messaging you!)

Lastly other people encourage people to comment by featuring ‘recent comments’ or ‘most prolific commenters’ in their side bar. This gives some added incentive to post comments.

A word of warning – Be selective in how many of the above tips you implement. A common mistake is to give you readers too many ways to interact with you and have ‘bells and whistles’ just for the sake of having lots of features. This will clutter your page and confuse your reader.

The level and type of interaction of your blog is up to you. It will depend upon your personality, content and willingness to put time into interacting with your readers. In my opinion the benefits are worth the effort.

A last tip – Don’t put any of the above tools on your blog unless you yourself are willing to use them in interacting with your readers. If you don’t have the time or energy to talk back – don’t advertise the fact that you do. I know a number of bloggers that get a lot of hits and wonder why they don’t get many comments – I reckon its because they largely ignore their readers. Thats just my theory.