I’ve been asked by quite a few people in person and in comments why I chose to switch to a WordPress.com weblog setup, moving away from the Mozillazine Moveable Type installation.

Almost every person asks – why would you want to give up the power of your own installation and move to a free web service? The answer is simple: I prefer simplicity to power when it comes to maintaining a weblog. I can understand why many bloggers would want to have the power of a MT installation, but not me.

I don’t want to hand-edit templates, muck with CSS, or make my own designs. I don’t want to go through a confusing 10-step process just to get category-specific RSS feeds (never got that working with MT at all, WordPress.com does it automatically). I was always trying to figure out how to do simple things with the MT installation, but with this WordPress.com weblog I did everything I always wanted to do in about 1.5 hours. I didn’t have to use a help system or look something up on Google once. It may not be as theoretically powerful, but the WordPress.com interface is simple, intuitive, and it just works. It empowers me.

(Note: It literally took me 1 minute to flawlessly import my old weblog into the WordPress.com system, comments and all. Awesome.)