Image by Steve Rhodes via Flickr
Which means I'll often do things the hard way. I could have started this blog on a free blog host (there are quite a few), but I wouldn't learn nearly as much about blogging software. So I've spent the last few days fiddling with various versions of Movable Type blogging software, and finally settling on the Open Source version of MT 4.33. I'll explain that choice (and also describe my brief experience with WordPress) in a later post.
I'm pretty happy with this version of Movable Type, but I don't plan to stay locked into it. I probably won't bother with other software that's primarily about blogging (unless it has some feature I really want to check out) but I plan to fiddle with various Web CMS solutions, and most of those have blogging support that I'll want to try.
You have to sign in to comment. (Sorry about that, but I don't have time for the usual online snipers and flame warriors.) But you don't have to register. In fact you can't. Instead, you log in using your user ID from Google, Live Journal, and a few other portals and blogging providers. Or if you have an OpenID URL, you can use that. Just click the "sign in" link and follow the instructions.
To do list: learn enough about Movable Type to do some drastic customization of its look and feel. In particular, this fixed-width layout has to go.
BUG!!!! MT comes with a plugin application called Zemanta, which (among other things) helps you find graphics to go with your blog entry. That's how I found the photo above, which a certain Steve Rhodes has been good enough to release with a Creative Commons license. Zemanta also embeds an info link for the image, but somehow I managed to change that link to point to openid.net -- and Zemanta seems to have permanently re-associated that image with the new URL. Uncool!
