On the SitePoint Web Tech blog Raena Jackson-Armitage has a recent post on a few tools that you can use to mimic some of the functionality Twitter offers (three of them) with applications that already exist.

If you're anything like me, you've already wondered how easy it would be to make your own—perhaps you'd like to set up a microblog for you and your colleagues to share links and have discussions. [...] Today we’ll look at three new solutions that are easy to set up, have reasonably modest hosting requirements, and even include some features that blow Twitter out of the water.

They suggest three tools:

• the P2 plugin for WordPress
• the Motion plugin for Movable Type
• Laconica (the platform that Identica runs on, a full Twitter clone with other added features)

Each of these comes with a description of installation, features offered and use.

If you've a blogger and you've been thinking about moving platforms (say from MovableType to WordPress) you mightwant to check out this new blog post from Maggie Nelson about her experience switching between the two.

It's been a while [since I last tried WordPress] and things seem to have improved - some within WordPress itself, but others due to the help of the community which has provided tons of plugins that can help WordPress get around some of its problems. The move from MovableType to WordPress was easy. WordPress has import functionality that plays very nicely with MovableType's exported files. Yay!

Her only problem was making sure that references to the site weren't broken. She made the move away from her old domain to a new one (maggienelson.com) and needed to set up some redirects to bridge the gap. The mod_rewrite module of Apache made things relatively simple. All of her rules (including the ones in the path she took to get to the file result) are included in the post.