Spent the past day or so putting up my movabletype blog. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I had the software on my computer for a couple of months. I never did anything with it. I re-downloaded it last night and loaded it on a web site I signed up for over a year ago. I chose it because it was free and it ran perl. I never did anything with the site until now.
It took a couple of hours to load it on the server and configure it. The three problems I had were getting the images to load in the movabletype interface, having the docs show up, and having the mt-load.cgi find my database folder. After some searching I learned how to set my StaticWebPath and the local path to my database folder.
Afterwards, I spent several hours importing my blogger entries and setting my preferences. I had a hard time getting trackback to work. I hadn’t screwed up the coding. Instead I missed something as simple as switching my pings to on by default in preferences and making an entry.
After that, I loaded my template and messed around with the style-sheet. I set up my categories and played around with the MTEntry code. I spent the next couple of hours sorting my entries by categories. And I finally added the code so that the category labels and links would show up with my entries. Then the moment of truth, I finally made a post.
I decided to keep both my blogger and movabletype blogs the same for the time being. I know I may not be the norm, but I like the simplicity of blogger. I don’t remember spending this much time setting up my first blogspot site over a year ago. I simply signed up, chose one of their generic templates and started posting. Of course I didn’t post that often. And I eventually killed the site. But it was simple. I think I went through at least 4 blogs before my current one. Then I got semi-hooked. And I learned how easy it made web site maintenance and content delivery. I deleted my old web site on geocities, and moved one of my old blogspot sites to angelfire where I hosted a number of files.
And then I started visiting other blogs. I found that most of the blogs I began to frequently visit weren’t blogger sites, but were independent movabletype powered blogs on personal web sites. What made me decide to diddle with the interface myself was bloggers past service problems over the past couple of months. There have been times when I haven’t been able to log into my blog. My site has been unreachable at times. The same goes for my archives.
But still, I’m a loyalist. And I’m lazy. And blogger is the lazy man’s entry into blogging. Next, of course, to the drunkmenworkhere blogs. I have one of those, too. It’s the part ii link.