Nick Denton, the British founder of the New York-based blog empire Gawker Media, got a lot of press last week for seeming to cut against the blogging hype by putting a couple of his sites on the block and firing the editors of a couple of others. But the comments from Nick that interested me had nothing to do with his restructuring. They lay instead in a post he wrote a few months back in which he lamented the troubles he's having with software.

Now this is something I can relate to.

The Gawker blogs, like many others, are built on a software platform called Moveable Type, from a start-up company called Six Apart. Moveable Type was one of the first and best pieces of blogging software, and as such was one of the key enabling technologies in the development of blogging in general. Indeed, the availability of dirt-cheap and easy-to-use publishing software is one of the most critical ingredients in today's media revolution.

When I was starting New West, I asked Nick for some advice, and among other things he suggested using Moveable Type. It was among a small set of possible choices, and it seemed to have some momentum in the market, which was important because you always want to be using software that's successful. Successful software, whether it's commercial or open source, tends to be steadily improved and well supported, and since changing is hard it's good to make the right choice up front.

In the event, we decided not to use Moveable Type. It was a contender, but for what we wanted to do there seemed to be some better choices and we ultimately ended up choosing between an open-source platform called Drupal and an inexpensive commercial product called Expression Engine. In all cases, the cost of the software itself was negligible (or nothing in the case of the open-source options), but the cost of configuring it to have it do what you wanted was not.

One of the big benefits of Drupal, supposedly, was a large and active community of developers, which meant that if you had a problem or needed a customised solution there would be lots of ways to get that done. I was always a little wary of this claim; at the time, at least, I couldn't really find that many Drupal developers, and most of them seemed to be in Scandinavia. My scepticism about this was one of the reasons we ultimately went with Expression Engine.

So you can imagine my somewhat grim satisfaction in reading this from Nick: "We always thought that it would be an advantage to Gawker to use Movable Type as a publishing platform. A host of plug-ins to provide additional functionality, and a community of developers to tap. Well, in practice, the plug-ins have been the bane of our existence: some are incompatible, others resource hogs. And the great community of MT developers is more impressive in theory than in practice."

Now my point here is not to pat myself on the back. Expression Engine, though it has been a good choice in many respects, has also proved very frustrating. It uses a lot of computing resources for a site with our level of traffic, and no one can figure out why. Some of its features are much more primitive than they should be. We're very dependent on a small group of developers who know the system, and the learning curve for non-specialists seems to be steep. For most extensions or plug-ins or extra features, we have to build them ourselves. I've often wondered whether we made the right choice.

Part of my stump speech for New West is that inexpensive publishing software has changed the competitive landscape in media. When I was at the Industry Standard, we spent more than a million dollars developing our website, mucking around with all kinds of clunky and hugely expensive software. The initial build of New West was two orders of magnitude cheaper – and we wouldn't be in business were it not for that.

Yet as Gawker's experience confirms even more than mine, the truth is that the effort to create powerful, flexible and inexpensive publishing software is still in an early phase. Moveable Type, Drupal, Expression Engine and Wordpress are all impressive pieces of software, but they all have significant limitations too. There's still a lot you can do with a multi-million dollar software budget that you can't do with a multi-thousand-dollar one.

Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft ultimately hope to exploit this gap by having publishers build on their all-singing, all-dancing computing platforms. Then, of course, the publisher has to give up a lot of control (and possibly a lot of business), and that's a dangerous bargain.

Most publishers don't much like to think about software – we tend to be word people, after all – but we don’t have much choice. Eventually, I hope, we'll be able to think about it less – but not for quite some time yet.

Jonathan Weber is the founder and editor in chief of NewWest.Net, a new type of regional news and information service focused on the Rocky Mountain West in the United States. He was previously the co-founder and editor in chief of the Industry Standard

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