Whoops, Wrong Blog. Oh, Wait…

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Whoops, Wrong Blog. Oh, Wait…

By Sparkus ⋅ August 16, 2007 ⋅

No, you’ve come to the right place. The blog is undergoing a lot of changes.

Aside from the very obvious design change, the majority of changes are under the hood — things readers won’t see, but are large improvements for me, the blog writer.

Problems I was experiencing with Internet Explorer not being able to see embedded videos from YouTube or Google Video prompted me to look into new turnkey blog software.

On my home computer, which runs Vista and the latest versions of Internet Explorer 7 and Norton Internet Security, the embedded blog videos were not displaying properly when I viewed the blog in Internet Explorer.

I was using WordPress at the time to run my blog and decided to give Movable Type a shot.

It turns out that the same problem occurs with Movable Type as with WordPress. So the problem is one that is out of my hands as a blog designer and most likely originates from some combo of Vista, IE 7 and Norton Internet Security not playing well together.

On another machine which uses XP, IE 7 and an enterprise edition of Norton Antivirus, everything works fine.

Oh and Firefox runs my blog beautifully on either machine. Yet another reason to drop IE for Firefox.

Though Movable Type didn’t fix the issue I originally sought to remedy, after installing the open-source blogging software on my server and poking around with the software’s offerings, I decided I needed to switch anyway.

Movable Type is like the grown-up version of WordPress. It offers better options and controls of the blog’s functions even though it’s a lot less user friendly. You really have to know a little something about Web design to get anything accomplished. There are functions I’m still trying to figure out.

I little of the challenge has to do with the fact that I opted to install Movable Type 4, which is still in Beta testing. A lot of the plugins that are normally developed to help streamline certain tasks of the blog haven’t even been written yet.

For instance, integrating Feedburner into the site to handle my blog’s e-mail subscriptions and feed delivery may take some time. In other words, there will be a lot of tinkering over the following days, weeks or even months to get the blog precisely the way I like.

You also may notice the older blog entries look a little jumbled and, well, ugly. That’s because Movable Type doesn’t really like how WordPress formatted my old posts and I’ll have to go back and clean up each one.

But in the meantime, I hope you like the blog’s new look and functionality.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to comment.