I've been blogging in one form or another for 4 years. For the majority of that time I've used Movable Type. I've used WordPress enough to stay up to date with it though. The same goes for TypePad and Blogger. So when I started photoblogging I hacked my way through it with Movable Type. MT isn't meant for photoblogs specifically so it wasn't exactly a piece a cake. It took some time but eventually I got everything the way I wanted in Movable Type. I was very pleased. Over time though I became frustrated with the steps that it took to post photos and create thumbnails.

I couldn't just upload an image simply. I had to upload the image, insert the HTML into entry field, insert the thumbnail into another field and insert the description text into yet another field. A process that really should take very little time took much more than I wanted it too. So I decided to give Pixelpost a try. Pixelpost's sole purpose is photoblogging. As such it's designed to do all the standard things that photobloggers typically want to do. Easy category setup, automatic thumbnail creation, grid of thumbnails for archive pages, etc. Also it uses PHP instead of MT's perl which speeds things up considerably. And also, it's open source (I think).

So I anxiously installed Pixelpost last week. The install process was relatively painless (if you don't already have a MySql database setup on your server you'll need to do that; that's about the most difficult part of the process) . Once I got the software installed it was an absolute breeze to get up and running with it. I'm talking seriously easy. After playing with it for only a few minutes I knew that I was going to abandon my MT photoblog.

I searched for a utility to port my Movable Type photoblog entries over to my new Pixelpost photoblog but found the only plugin (add-on in Pixelpost speak) for the task didn't work for me. I probably did something wrong in trying to use the add-on but it wasn't worth fooling around with an extended period of time to figure it out. I just manually copied over images that I wanted. That process allowed me to weed out some images that never should have been on my photoblog in the first place. The only downside is that comments from my Movable Type blog didn't get moved over. There weren't a great deal of comments so this isn't a great tragedy. Next up is the port my Movable Type photoblog design (which I still like) over to Pixelpost. This shouldn't be too terribly difficult.

If blogging is still in its infancy then photoblogging is a newborn. It's an unknown concept to most people, even to a lot of those who are familiar with blogs in general. A breif description of photoblogging would be something like "photoblogging is the act of posting photographs to blogs." That sounds pretty dumb doesn't it? But that's what it is. Blogs are spaces where people can write and post their thoughts on any and everything. Photoblogs are the exact same, except with photographs. You can share your photography, you can invite other people to comment on your photos, you can send your family the link to your photoblog so everyone you want to can see your photography. That's pretty cool. The point of this brief intro to and definition of photoblogging is to point out that if you want to get started with a photoblog you can't go wrong with using Pixelpost.