François Nonnenmacher (EN) | FR

"How are you using the tool?" asks Mena Trott to Movable Type users.

My own setup is as follows.

Padawan.info is built with three weblogs, one in English, one in French and one multilingual links weblog that I built to supplement the lack of such functionality in MT (which exists in TypePad under the name TypeLists). I consider these weblogs a logical assembly that makes a single web site, however I'm not sure that the recent changes in the license terms cover this setup, i.e. can this site be viewed as a single web site (as I view it) or are www.padawan.info and www.padawan.info/fr two different sites according to Six Apart?

I also have a test weblog that I use to test new templates, or hacks, or any modification I fancy but don't want to test live on the visible site. It's purely a sandbox for development purposes, and I would strongly resent if I had to count it as part of the number of active weblogs. But I think that this is not an issue with the present terms (although a clarification would help, especially for the developers.)

I have two author accounts just for myself to overcome a bug or a limitation in the MT API. My first account contains my first name (François) which has a diacritical character in it (ç). This worked well until I started to use desktop applications such as NetNewsWire or Ecto to post to my weblog. It seems that the API doesn't like to swallow a login name that contains diacriticals, so I had to create a new login name in pure ASCII to overcome this limitation (it also helps when I post from abroad on US/UK keyboards, since I can't get accents from them.) But I left the first account so that old posts made under that account are not impacted. I'm not sure that the license covers the case of the same person using different accounts (I can think of another reason, an editorial choice, where a single author would want to post under different avatars.) May be the license should be based on the number of identified individuals editing content, not as the number of authors accounts in an MT installation.

I also have a second domain (currently hidden) under the same server, but because of the way my hosting provider has configured it, I have two different accounts and am forced to install a second copy of MT. This has nothing to do with MT's capacities to handle multiple weblogs, just a server configuration issue that forces me to have two installations (therefore two licenses) when just one would suffice.

The fact is, after 18 months of using and sometimes hacking MT, that the way it works and the features it has (or has not) make me uncomfortable with both limits in terms of weblogs and authors, because I found that I had to leverage them to work around limitations or push the software forward.

More thoughts will follow soon.