I tell you what, if I didn’t firmly believe in the sanctity of controlling the domain where you post to I would scrap my plan to use Movable Type and just use TypePad. Let’s talk about the comment feature, which is basically the same as MT’s (but different than other blog tools).
You can enable comments on a per post basis, which is nice control to have. Maybe you don’t usually want comments. But then you post something where you do want comments. Having the ability to control commenting on a per post basis is nice to have.
Other blog tools like Radio have minimal comment features. With MT/TP you can opt to be notified of comments by email. You can also edit comments, not that you would do that to change the substance, but sometimes people have typos and they can’t edit them. With TP you can do it for them.
And not that you would do this either, but you can delete comments or even ban someone from further posting of comments. Granted the ban is by IP address so a minimally tech-savvy person would be undeterred but there is that option.
There are a lot of nice features to TypePad, and the commenting features are just one example.
P.S. If you want a better practice, check out this Ultimate Guide.
Nice to see that TypePad will be adding support for domain names. I’ll add this info to my blog–as soon as I get recalcitrant Radio working again, or move to another platform.
Jerry Lawson
P.S. It is true that much of TypePad’s functionality is included in Movable Type, as noted by another commenter, but many people will appreciate the fact that TypePad is hosted on a central server–no installation hassles.
Just so you know, we’ll be adding domain name support to TypePad soon (before September) so you can point your own address at your TypePad site. Between that and the export function, I think most users would feel pretty secure that they control their own site.
I think those are all features of Movable Type, even if you’re not on TypePad.