Bryan Bell points to this post (Stopdesign | The New Blogger) by Douglas Bowman about the new Blogger role out and some of the design considerations that went into the redesign. I launched my Blogger account and took a look around and was very impressed. Comments are now an option, along with file uploading. With all the talk of the new licensing pricing of MoveableType, I'm thinking I may just go ahead and have my students in my Pacific University class set up a Blogger site for use in the class. They can get a free spot on Blogspot, or if I do some planning, I can create each of them a directory and ftp login on my server and have them post their class weblog there. More MoveableType: Lots of discussion going on about the new MoveableType 3.0 licenseing. As Liz Lawley noted, it looks like the SixApart folks are aware of the use of MT at educational institutions, and how their new pricing makes use of the 3.0 version prohibitive. Hopefully they get this right. But, as it has been noted, there are quite a few OpenSource solutions out there.

The 2.6x version of MT works very well for us at Lewis, and I plan to continue to use it. But I will spend some time this summer playing around with some other tools. Tom is very high on Plone, also Drupal looks like a very feature rich tool. Will suggests Manila. I have experience running a Manila server. For about a year and a half we hosted several teacher support sites using Frontier and Manila, but Manila is not an option for us at Lewis. For one thing we have our site hosted and don't run our own server. Another reason is cost. I really want to work with a tool that will not have ongoing licensing costs.