I frequently have people ask me what software I used to create MabryOnline.org. It was a version of MovableType 3, by a company called Six Apart. We purchased the school license for only $300, "back in the day." With a $200 hosting plan at Dreamhost, we had this killer web presence for only $500--and a lot of my blood, sweat, and tears. (Actually, bad words stood in for the tears as I was teaching myself how to do something that was so complicated to me at the time: install a blogging system on a server, create and linked in a database, and create a collection of blogs that would need little or no maintenance, be easy for teachers to use, and look like a website.)

But after the tortuous experience of teaching myself how to do all of this, I can't tell you how much I liked MovableType, now that I had learned and understood it. But all good things come to an end. The MovableType 3 product life cycle ended, and MovableType 4, with powerful, enhanced functionality and a completely different "under the hood" approach to managing the building and implementation of blogs came along. But in addition to this vastly enhanced feature set, the cost of a license now was well beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest schools. I checked with them a few of months ago. A license similar to the one we had at Mabry Middle School would now cost an unbelievable $16,000! I was stunned.

So I set my eyes on WordPress MU, another blogging system. But WordPress is open source and therefore free. I even set up a working copy on my server and played around with it. "Free" sounded really good to me. More and more school districts around the country are catching on to using this platform as their web presence rather than paying companies big profit margins to do it for them. The only problem I had with WordPress: it lives in a programming language I do not know: PHP. (MovableType 3 lived on top of PHP; so, I never had to know PHP to use it effectively.) But in WordPress, without some understanding of PHP, the user has little control of styling the look, feel, and emotional tone of the blog. I suspect that this is the reason you can spot a WordPress blog from a mile away: few really know how to dig into the code to really get a totally customized blog.

This would never do for me. I not only enjoy the whole design and branding aspect of web technology representing who we are to the world, I feel using design to create and shape public image and support as well as the nature of the institution itself is a critical and powerful aspect of using these tools well. However, I'm just not up for a big battle between me and a programming language. Those battles make my brain hurt and require a lot of time I just don't have.

So last week, I went back and explored MovableType again. I was stunned. I was shocked. In fact, I couldn't believe what I read on their website: their license is now free for a K-12 institution and individuals???! Certainly I read it wrong or this was an error on their site. I sent them an email. "Is this really true," I asked? This quotation from their support staff: "Yes, you are correct, K-12 schools AND Individuals qualify for the free Movable Type Blogger license."

Wow! From a $16,000 license fee to free--just like that! So, over the next few months, in all of my free time (which doesn't exist), I'm going to install MT4 Pro on my server and come up to speed on this latest version. If I fall in love with MT all over again, I'll upgrade my personal blog. Maybe I'll even help K-12 institutions work their way into this space. I'm sort of excited about it, actually. With the dawning of HTML 5 and CSS 3 right around the corner, I will now have thousands of reasons never to sleep again!