Metablogging stuff

A confluence of factors have prodded me into spending the whole day nerding about in the Movable Type back-end.

Movable Type recently went through an upgrade. I was reluctant to install the upgrade, since I had made some custom mods to MT, and wasn’t sure how difficult it would be to reproduce these in the new version. But that new version also has some nice bells and whistles that I wanted, like the handy Search field you see here.

Blogger has been having trouble, and that’s where Jenny’s blog lives (or lived, to be precise). I offered to help her move her blog into MT, and after a week of frustration, she accepted this offer. But I figured “I’ll be damned if I import her old blog, just to wind up updating MT at some point in the future.”

So it was time to bite the bullet. I wiped my old installation of MT off the server (keeping the database, thank you) and installed the new one. Went through the process of customizing it again. Imported Jenny’s blog. Rejiggered my templates to work in her blog with her look. Started messing with the new features. Installed John Gruber’s nifty Smarty Pants plugin.

All things considered, the whole process went pretty smoothly, and more quickly than I’d hoped.