Blogger v/s Movable Type : I had asked in the Blogger Support group the following question below and was pleasantly surprised at the quality of answers received. A special mention should go to Philip Ulrich who gave a detailed reply ….

What are the advantages that MovableType has over Blogger ?

1. It is free. In all versions. There’s not a Pro version with more features that still don’t work – MT is totally free. You can make a donation if you wish, and then you can get a recently updated key that will display your blog on MT’s frontpage when you make a post (and it works reliably, unlike “Recently Updated Blogs,” which sometimes wouldn’t move for months.

2. It is decentralized. Take this as an advantage or disadvantage; I like it, myself. It means your webpage and MT scripts are ALL stored on your server – there’s no central webpage to go to in order to make weblog posts.

3. It is in Perl, and supports MySQL, both tried-and-true open source systems. This is more a matter of preference. However, the Perl language means you can actually hack away at the code yourself if you like, and there’s a system in place for plugins – and boy, are there ever plugins.

4. Full support of the Blogger API and MetaWeblog APIs – and the Blogger API actually WORKS, with MT.

5. Category support, ability to change the dates of posts, extended entries and entry excerpts, extremely flexible categorizing (daily, monthly, weekly, individually, and categorically, with an automatic filename or filenames you specify).

6. Supports pinging of weblogs.com and blo.gs with no hacking, plugins, etc.

7. Built-in comments system, as well as Trackback. (Read the MT docs for more on Trackback; it is an email unto itself)

8. Did I mention free?

Now it’s seriously getting me to think of moving over.