Thought I would pop in just to say a few words about where the blog is...
- I am fully migrated to Movable Type 4.31. It was relatively painless and went smoothly.
- I got rid of all the anti-spam plugins except TypePad anti-spam. In my previous installation, I actually had several modules installed and active and I'm suspicious that they didn't all play nice together or make for a better user experience. So far, I haven't seen a wave of exciting new spam with just the TypePad anti-spam plugin, so I'm going to leave it on its own in the hope that maybe it will improve the commenting situation on the blog.
- All of the links for purchasing my patterns have been converted over to Ravelry. Unfortunately, this does eliminate the shopping cart option that I had with E-junkie, but it also saves me some money for months when pattern sales are low to none.
- I learned a bit about the concept of "pages" in Movable Type -- these are web pages built from a template that are separate from blog pages and entries. The idea is that they are meant mostly as static pages that have some consistent HTML wrapped around them. I converted the pages for the patterns I have for sale into this system and have decided that I need to move all of my old static pages into this system. Previously I maintained the static pages with an elderly version of DreamWeaver and my blog with Movable Type. I'm now going to migrate everything into Movable Type, which, I hope, will save me time and be easier for me to maintain.
- The newest version of Movable Type has nice basic templates for building full on websites with multiple blogs, community sections, etc. After installing a test site just to see what it looked like, I realized that not just my blog, but my whole website could use a little face lift. Since I also suspect that some of the problems I have with commenting are related to page layout issues and how fast my templates can be processed and pages generated (I think that blank page comes up because the pages that are being updated with the comments are still building and the webserver times out the process) I want to try to move my blog into a fresh installation, moving my old templates into the new framework. So far, the process is going well. After a few evenings of jiggling around the base CSS and bringing in some of the stuff that Becky built for me I have a very presentable front entry screen into my website. The blog is next!
You're making my brain hurt !
I understand some of what you are talking about, but some is way over my head. :0)
Hope you get back to your knitting soon.
Here's hoping that this all sticks and you don't get any more "issues" with the blog.
Theresa, you're a bad influence! I did as you urged and voted for the Fiber Farm for AmEx (they came in at #8, so made it to the semifinals!) but -- I bought a yarn share from this fall's shearing. Splitting it with a friend, and it's for a good cause, but still. . . I thought I was trying to get rid of stash, not add new wonderful stuff.
Sad to hear that you'll be leaving us :(