I’ve been using MovableType since August, and I’m thrilled with it. I wish more bloggers used MT, and here’s why:

• Comments are integrated and searchable. A lot of my Google hits are on comments people have left. With 3rd-party commenting services like Haloscan, you’re at the mercy of their server to keep your comments working, and you can’t turn comments on and off for particular threads. Also, you usually can’t do much to customize the format of your comment boxes, and you generally can’t make them appear below your post (in the same page) without some major code gymnastics. You can have them emailed to you, and it’s easy to delete rogue comments and even ban posters by IP address.
• You can group entries by category, and even display archives by category (like Leighton does with FusionPublisher). See GodWandering for an example of using images to display the category of a post.
• Your options for how content is arranged are nearly endless, since MT has its own system of tags. Every element you see in this blog, such as recent comments and permalinks and comment author email addresses, has its own tag, so you can do almost anything imaginable with the various elements of a blog.
• W.Bloggar and other BloggerAPI tools are fully compatible with Movable Type.
• There is a huge community of MT developers who write plugins to enhance MT’s functionality. They’ve even written a programming language that MT can execute.
• Everything is hosted on your server, and once it’s set up, it’s fairly low-tech to operate. This is the primary disadvantage for most people, as it presents a bit of a technological hurdle, but it’s about the cheapest high-end blog possibility out there. TypePad is the low-geek-factor, for-profit version, and you’ve probably seen sites like Paradoxology and TallSkinnyKiwi that are just awesome-looking.
• If you aren’t into designing your own templates from scratch like I did (which took a solid week), you can get tons of great-looking free ones.
• Your visitors will love you, because you can do very cool things that are not possible with other blogging tools, like choose whether to archive individually (my preference) or by day, week, month, or category; whether to have inline or popup (my preference) comments; whether to allow comments on a certain thread; excerpt posts automatically so only the first few lines appear on the main page, with a link to the full post; and so much more.
• RSS feeds are easy. You can even pull other people’s RSS feeds into your pages (see SeattleScience for an example).
• If you can’t install it yourself, you can pay someone $40 to do it for you.
• No ads since you’re paying for your own server. I use WiredHub. Don’t pay more than $5 a month unless you use huge amounts of bandwidth.

If they were paying me, I’d probably go on, but they’re not. To be honest, I’m waiting for WindowsXP to reinstall on my other computer (new motherboard/long story), and I wanted to avoid the frustration of waiting, so this is my wheel-spinning gift to you.

Jordon Cooper: This is your official notice that you have transcended the level of blogging made possible by Blogger. I know you are fiercely loyal, and probably even have the Blogger Hoodie, but face it, man. It’s time. You already have your own server space. Come to the TypeSide.

Darren, Phil & Dan, the other Dan, and other MT users: Join me in trying to convince Coop to change!