Pretty much since I got this Powerbook, I used an old, battered copy of BBEdit for my text-editing purposes. I quite liked it; I mean, the main thing I liked about it was the whole 9-point Monaco thing. Seriously, for me, text-editing on the Mac meant nine-point Monaco.

It integrated into FTP quite well, but sometimes its PHP syntax highlighting was wanting a little. I couldn’t afford to shell out the $100+ necessary for a copy of BBEdit 8, though.

A couple of weeks back, I realised that, now I was on Tiger, I could try out those text editors I was so interested in previously. The brief chance I had to use Textmate wasn’t enough to get familiar with it, and by the time I had the chance to spend serious time with it, my 28-day trial was up.

So I tried skEdit. And was pleasantly surprised. It has a “site” feature, for managing whole directories and subsequent SFTPing to mirror the structure on a server. It’s smart enough to auto-fill your classes and ids out if there’s a properly-linked CSS file in your site structure. It’s also got excellent code-hinting (wherein it reminds you of syntax for styles or functions), and the auto-completion, once you’re used to it, really speeds up the writing of code.

Add to that good snippet handling, good code tidying, and great auto-indentation, and it’s a really nice editor. The best bit? It’s $20 – for a lifetime licence. My demo ran out yesterday, so I bought myself a licence. I haven’t looked back – it’s been that pleasant an experience, and it’s already proved its worth over three seperate projects. It has some shortcomings – it is, after all, a text editor designed for web development, and doesn’t quite have the featuresets of Textmate or BBEdit. However, that’s all I need; I use a different text editor for note taking and writing, and the rest of my development is web-based. So with that caveat in mind, skEdit comes strongly recommended.

I finally did it.

Today, I deleted all trace of Movable Type from my webserver. Specifically, MT 2.661 – don’t think I was, like, up-to-date or anything. I kept it on the server to run sideprojects with – and in case WordPress turned out to, like, suck (which it didn’t, though it was touch-and-go for a while).

Bye bye, 11mb comment database, full of adverts for casinos and illicit videos. Bye bye, another seven-odd mb of Perl cgi. I’ll miss you.

I really will. Just because I’m getting rid of it, doesn’t mean I don’t like it. I know that MT3 is streets ahead of the old junk I was running, and as an enterprise blogging/CMSlite application (with a decent templating language), it’s fantastic – and remarkably powerful. Despite the colossal overlap, WordPress serves a slightly different niche; a niche that I mainly fit into, but where I don’t, I’ve got the capability (thanks to new found PHP-fu) to make it fit me.

I moved to MT from Blogger, when I bought this domain, and it was a very good move; I spent the couple of days before my exams revising, and when not revising, trying to wrangle MT into my cgi-bin directory. I swore I’d do it after them, but it seemed so easy, you know?

Fortunately, both turned out OK. But now it’s time to say goodbye to an old friend. My hosting company told me I was over quota, and I needed that 20mb of diskspace gone; I need space for my own systems, projects, applications.

Still, you lasted two years, despite all the trend-hopping around you. That’s got to be good going for any install of a web-app. Right?