Wow. I’ve finally gotten around to taking Karthik’s recommendation that I try WordPress b/c ‘I’ll never go back’. Now, I haven’t given it a full try just yet - haven’t even made a post. But I will tell you this — the install is CAKE. They tell you on the site that it takes 5 minutes, and they’re really not kidding. If your webhost supports PHP and mysql, all it takes is asking your webhost to create a mysql database for you called ‘wordpress’ and have them tell you the username, password, and host, modify 3 or 4 lines of text in a single file, upload everything to your website, and then just run the install program. I’ve never had a script be so simple to install and run so flawlessly right from the start. I’m already getting excited about some of WordPress’s features, like the ability to customize the list of places to ping, the preinstalled plug-in that you can just click to activate where if someone comes to your site from google, the search terms they used will be hilited on your page, the ability to set up endless categories and choose multiple categories for a post using checkboxes (what a pain it is to have to first select ‘multiple categories’ from the drop down box in TypePad and then ctrl-click to select all of your categories). And I did the install myself (aside from having my hosting company create a database for me) and it was still a snap, whereas the MovableType install looked difficult enough that I asked the techs at my webhost (Carpathia hosting) to do it for me, and they ran into some troubles (of what sort I don’t know) doing it, so it took them a couple of days to close the support ticket and I’d have thought it would have been really easy for them to do it,, given the extent of their technical knowledge. So I’m guessing WordPress is WAY easier to install than MovableType, but since I didn’t do both installation procedures myself I can’t say that for sure….

We’ll soon see how easy it is to post, customize templates, etc. with WordPress cuz that’s next on my list for my tool and hardware review blog