I’ve already figured out that I don’t want to use TypePad or Blogger (the two easiest tools to use) for my blogs as they’re not as robust and customizable as other options such as Movable Type, b2evolution, WordPress, and blosxom for example.

The problem is that all of these other tools have a decent sized learning curve, particularly if you are interested in customizing your templates, which I very much am. So if I’m going to invest all this time in creating my perfect blog, which means learning the software which powers it, I want to make sure I don’t waste too much of my time on a platform that doesn’t have as much community support or won’t necessarily keep up with new technologies as they emerge (like the way Blogger doesn’t support TrackBacks, for example)

It occurred to me to just do a google search for each of the tools in question to get an idea of how many pages reference those tools. Now, Movable Type has been around for a LONG time, so it’s likely that that will be the most popular of searches - yet, as mentioned in a previous post, there is concern in the Movable Type community that it’s creators might not put as much effort in keeping it up to date now that they have their new baby, TypePad.

In any case, here are the number of results that turn up when you search for the following terms in Google (the most popular search engine out there):

Movable Type = 1,610,000 results

blosxom = 13,700 results

b2evolution = 104,000 results

WordPress = 1,450,000

While I’m at it, might as well check Google PR (Page Rank) for each of the above mentioned sites to gain another sense of it’s popularity (or, as Google puts it, to gain a measure of the importance of a page):

WordPress has PR 7
b2evolution has PR 6
bloxsom has PR 8
Movable Type has PR 8
TypePad has PR 8
Blogger has PR 10

Hmm. Blogger has PR 10. Man, I wish they would implement the latest technology into Blogger so one can use it, because I really suspect google gives some level of priority in ranking to blogs created using the software THEY own and hosted on their server (blogspot). Anyone else ever wondered about this?