If you think about it, RSS feeds are very similar to email newsletters, but without all the fuss of collecting your visitors email addresses and manually sending them out. Now lets look at what we can do if we add Google’s FeedBurner to the mix.

By registering (also called burning) your blog RSS feed with FeedBurner, you’ll see how many subscribers you have; how may people click on your links to get to your blog posts; you can see what kind of tools your blog readers are using to read your blog updates; a geographic view of where your feed items were viewed in the most recent full day. You can even make some cash with your feeds by including Google Ads between the posts! So if you have a blog and are not using FeedBurner yet – I urge you to go ahead and sign up right now. You’re missing out!

WordPress was released in 2003 by Matt Mullenweg and it is being used by over 200 million websites and blogs wordwide. The company behind WordPress is Automattic. The software is open source – which means it is completely free, and you’re welcome to use it or modify however you want. If something happens to Automattic as a company, and they stop working on WordPress — the large WordPress community will take over, so you don’t have to worry about the longevity of the application and its existence 5 years from now. WordPress is easy to use, it’s lightweight, it is packed with some of the most amazing features you could find in a blog platform. There are over 7,500 free plugins that extend the functionality of WordPress, and over 1,100 themes (designs).

Movable Type was released in 2001 by the company called Six Apart. It is not an open source project like WordPress (although they do have an open source version, it’s not as feature-rich as the paid version). A couple of years ago Movable Type was the most recommended blog platform, and the platform of choice by many businesses and corporations. However, since Movable Type is not free for business-use, I’ve seen companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on licensing alone, and some go with WordPress for that reason alone. In other words licensing can be the deal breaker when choosing between Movable Type and WordPress. There are not as many plugins and themes comparing to WordPress. Software updates don’t come out as often, and many claim that it feels bloated and slow when working with or publishing your blog.

During the past 2 years I’ve seen a huge growth of WordPress (see chart below), many large corporations like TIME, Inc. switched from Movable Type to WordPress — which could either be because of the on-going licensing fees and the economy we are in, or the growing list of WordPress features. We’ve also seen the changes at Movable Type where they let go of some of their key people, then VP Anil Dash leaving the company a couple of months ago, and some other bitter things that I’m not going to discuss in this post.

Earlier in 2009 we converted our company site from Movable Type to WordPress, and helped many of our clients make the switch as well. As you might have guessed, our personal preference and recommendation is WordPress, however I will say it again — it all comes down to your specific needs, budget, and the situation you are in. If you are not sure on the platform you should be using — just shoot us an email and we’ll make a recommendation based on your scenario.

Unfortunately Movable Type 4 doesn’t provide any type of reporting functionality, especially in the form of CVS file that can be imported into Excel for further manipulation.

So the solution was to use phpMyAdmin that comes pre-installed with most blog hosting accounts, and create a query that would display exactly what we need. After about 30 minutes of studying Movable Type 4 tables I was able to come up with the following query that does exactly what we need. Since I wasn’t able to find anything like that on Google, I decided to make the code available to anyone with a large Movable Type installation, looking to see users to blogs association.

I hope this solves someone’s problem!