If the topic were anything more serious than blogging software, the dramatic and innovative rise, peak, and uitimate fall of Six Apart would have an Aristotelian quality to it. Six Apart revolutionized the blogging world in 2001 with its sophisticated, Perl scripted, individual blogging software, which was the dominant individual blogging software until it was overtaken by Wordpress later in the decade. The story of Movable type's demise is a complex one involving both design misjudgments and marketing errors, but by earlier this year Six Apart had been taken over by Say Media and Movable Type spun off to the a Japanese developer.
Last week, I jumped ship after using Movable Type for about eight years. I ported my blog to SquareSpace, a move that entails its own challenges, and shut down my Movable Type site. Despite my nostalgia for Movable Type's powerful and flexible platorm, despite my seduction by the idea of running an individual site independently of a big company, I was just too tired of running a site where I had been hacked, was constantly fighting a losing battle with comment spam, and was unable to implement design changes more suited to the mobile Internet. I'd like to express my appreciation to Ben and Mena Trott, the founders of Six Apart, for their innovative contribution to the web and their support for my blogging itch for many years. At this point, however, it's farewell Movable Type, hello SquareSpace.