With the upgrade to Moveable Type 3.2 I decided to upgrade the templates to the ones they recommended. It seemed just as well since the last time I upgraded things started to break, template-wise, and with the 3.2 version they offered a handy tool to get them all set up right.
Unfortunately that meant that my entire blog interface broke as soon as the templates were updated. This wasn't unexpected, but it was a hassle.
One of the advantages to having the new templates, though, is that there are a lot of stylesheets offered to create varying appearances for one's blog. (A stylesheet is a file that the web browser looks at to determine how to display a page. Thus it's possible to radically change a page's display just by changing the stylesheet file - and not having to reprogram the entire site's HTML.) I tried out a few, and hated them all.
And I liked what I had. I wasn't ready for a change. Changing the look and feel dramatically would seem to also suggest a dramatic change in the blog's content, and that's not happening (at least not today). Plus I found most of the suggested styles to be poor choices given my blog's content. I tend to write long, dense posts, and it's important to make them as easy to read as possible. I'm not sure the way I used to have it was ideal, but the old interface produced posts that were much more legible than any of the new stylesheets I tried.
So instead I settled on using a stylesheet that I could fairly easily hack to make it look like the old one. I used the "green grass" one, and changed it from this to what you see here. It took some doing, but thankfully I have some web development skills... In a way it was fun to dust them off and engage in the unique problem-solving exercise of web development. But in another way it was completely irritating...
There are still some things I need to tweak or fix, as I get around to it. One particular problem that I can't figure out - but I'm sure I didn't cause - is the random closing tag at the top of the monthly archive pages. And I might squish some things closer together, or rearrange little bits of things. But mostly I'm satisfied, and it's mostly the same as it was.
(One thing that is different, however, is that there's no longer a calendar. I could ressurrect it if I wanted - with some effort - but Six Apart recommends against it since it slows down site rebuild times. I have enough problems trying to keep my ISP from crashing while I rebuild things, so the time-savings is much more appealing than the calendar was. Plus maybe now I'll be less inclined to backdate things...)
Edited 1/6. Actually, maybe "edited" isn't the word as much as "completely-rewritten" would be... I'd written the first version of this post at one o'clock in the morning, which didn't do much for fluidity, but I wrote it as a test post as much as anything so it seemed reasonable to go back and fix it in the light of day, particularly after having made more fixes.
Edit again: I figured out how to fix that extra closing tag problem. Have I got skillz or what...