Well, I think I’m approaching the apogee of the third stage of blogging, at least in Moveable Type. Oh, no, not because I’ve learned everything there is to know about MT, but because I’ve learned just enough to know there’s a hell of a lot I don’t know about what I’m doing with the blog; when I run it through the validator there are a hell of a lot of errors that I don’t really understand (well, some). I might be able to do a lot of cleanup, or more likely a lot of damage to my main index template by trying to “fix” it.

There’s been a persistent “bug” that I’ve never been able to kill off: it’s something to do with IE and divs touching or anti-matter coming into contact with matter (no wait, that’s Star Trek technobabble).

I’ve added a lot of crap to the sidewall and it looks busy, especially compared to the relatively “clean” sites I read most often.

I’ve never been completely happy with the stupid bad hack job I did with the banner graphic. It looks like crap and is crap, it’s not Scottish at all! And also, not terribly original, and then there is the…ahem… provenance problem.

Meanwhile, I’ve been goofing around with a side project with Blogger, and have set up two test blogs over there. Which were completely easy to do, and although the default templates for Blogger are mostly blah rectilinear clones of basic Gettysburg or Clean MT templates, there was one that was actually attractive in a nice, old fashioned, bookish sort of way. And it took all of 5 minutes to set it up. Although, oddly, the attractive template wasn’t one of the few defaults that you’re given on first setup – but it’s there as an alternative once you’ve gotten started.

Although it’s not possible to upload files without a paid account, you can put pictures in posts (a little like a moblog) using a free thing called…hello from pikasa or some such. Actually, it’s pretty slick.

I’d show you, but they’re just test blogs. However, it’s surprising how easy they were to set up. No bugging David with “Honey, how do I” questions. And I knew just enough “advanced” stuff to be able to figure out how to do things.

Since Moveable Type seems to be coming back to a reasonable equipoise as regards to licensing and authors and so on, I’m thinking it might be worth it to pay up to upgrade – the lowest price is now totally fair. When and if I do, I may leave a lot of the little stickers and pixies and doodads behind. I’m not using them, and they sort of “brand” me as a hopeless fangirl geekette… which I am, no disputing that. But I’m also feeling like it should be more about what I have to say, and not endlessly sticking more crap on the sidewall.

No matter how cool and cute it is. 😉