In Progress

7:00pm — Hm. I went ahead and installed a newer version of Movable Type, and it’s light-years ahead of what I was using. The installation went almost as smoothly as can be, but trying to refresh back to the default design is… not. Obviously. I’ll be working on this as quickly as I can bear it, but thanks for your patience in the meantime.
8:22pm — Okay, am getting the design slowly pulled back together by manually tweaking the CSS. So at least the main page is looking less awful, but I’m a little bit afraid to look further (ie, I’m not sure why the archive pages haven’t shaken the old style, even though I rebuilt them. We’ll see.)
9:10pm — Better and better. I’m a little disappointed with how hands-on I’m going to have to be to clean up the templates. When I tried to refresh the archives templates (which control the look and content of monthly archives, individual entries, etc), they pretty much all bounced back saying it looked like I had a custom template in place. I do, of course, and it’s nice of MT to notice, but it doesn’t seem to give me the option of saying, ‘I don’t care — refresh it anyway!’
Other than that, I’m just blown away by the difference between this newer version of MT and the old one I was using. So many options. So dynamic. There’s still no straight-forward way of adding a blogroll (there are ways around it, though), but the available widgets are still pretty cool. Heck, I’m pleased just to have a drop-down menu for archives!
I’m not sure how much further I’ll progress tonight. It’s time for some popcorn and a break for my eyes (that is, watching Hulu, which is easier on my farsighted eyes — new reading glasses in a week!).
10:55pm — Okay, I lied. I had to get the archive templates sorted out. There’s still work to do (have to add things back into the sidebar, for example), but I think the bulk of it is done.
I’m really excited to have fully functional comments — I’d messed up my old code at some point, so it was always a bit wonky. But now, hopefully, the site will be able to remember your information and you can preview comments, etc, etc. I’m curious as to what the ‘sign in’ link above the comment fields is all about. I thought I’d turned off any sort of local registration option, and when I click on it, it automatically signs me in as Anna Torborg. I’m not sure if it’s grabbing that info from my signed-in status on Movable Type or what. Can you see that little link?
I’m rather amused — and a little bit weirded out, to be honest — that this entire upgrade was the result of a dream. I’d had no intention on changing platforms or anything before I went to sleep last night. And yet, here we are. Let me know about any bugs if/when you find them!
11:10pm — Arg! After all that talk about comments, it seems like they’re busted. It acts as though it’s been submitted (and is pending approval), but they’re going nowhere. No notification, nothing in the control panel. So don’t waste your time trying to comment just yet. I’m calling it a day, though.
Tuesday, 9:15am — Okay, maybe comments are working? I’d be much obliged if you’d try posting a comment, so I can see. I think the issue was that all comments were getting sent to the spam folder, so hopefully I can ‘train’ the plugin to know what is and isn’t spam, or I’ll have to remove it altogether (a scary prospect).
p.s. — The breakfast photo has nothing to do with the post, except that I don’t like a photoless blog update… and a good breakfast can fuel you through anything!