I write for a couple of blogs. The one you’re reading, diversity.net.nz uses a self-hosted version of wordpress.com, one of the most widely known blogging software offerings around (WordPress offers both self-hosted and WordPress hosted blogs).

The other blog I write for from time to time is ReadWriteWeb, one of the top ten most popular blogs in the world (like over a million unique’s a month popular!). RWW uses another blogging solution, Movable Type.

Now I’m not a geek so won’t argue the relative merits of one solutions over the other from a technical viewpoint – what I will do however is look at user experience as I’ve found it.

I don’t like html – I don’t see why I shouldn’t be able to type something the same way I want it to appear on a website – it’s what happens in my word processor and should be what happens elsewhere. Luckily WordPress has a lovely WYSIWYG interface and it works perfectly – I’ve never had formatting issues whatsoever. Similarly I sometimes use Windows Live Writer for editing posts – this was a doddle to set up and again has excellent and failsafe WYSIWYG functionality.

Movable Type however has thus far fallen down in my judgement. The default post editor includes raw html and rich text options – unfortunately the rich text options sees to both break html, and display the text differently from how it will actually appear  the screen. It seems the only way to add WYSIWYG to Movable Type is through some administrator-level hack – which in my case isn’t feasible (I’m just a lowly sometimes guest author )

It’s annoying, it shows a lack of user-centricity and it’s making me angry.

Right – back to editing now!