Well, I finally got an installation of MT that works for me, however, so far, I HATE it. I am in extreme dislike of the templates and would prefer to be able to use my own creations, but the setup doesn’t seem to be conducive to that type of thing. Frankly, I’m not thrilled with having my blog that is hosted on my paid servers look like it’s on Vox or TypePad, which is precisely what it looks like. And frankly, I don’t have time to sit here and try to figure out the ins and outs of the template structure for MT. It only took me a couple of hours to figure out the theme structure for WordPress, but I can’t even figure out where in MT the templates are stored, much less how to make my own. I’m thinking I’ll play with the MT installation I have, but that I’m going to pretty much stick to WP for my blogging. I know it, it’s easy, and frankly, except for the occasional issue, I haven’t had any major problems with it.

All blogging platforms have their good and bad points. I know people who wouldn’t touch MT and I know people who won’t even consider WP. There’s a gal I work with who won’t leave Blogger no matter WHAT they do. She says if they ever shut down Blogger, she just wouldn’t have a blog. Now THAT is dedication to a blog platform.

I’ve tried Vox, TypePad, WordPress.com, Blogger, LiveJournal, DeadJournal, MySpace, B2Evolution, GreyMatter, Nucleus, and CuteNews. I’ve blogged without the aid of ANY platform at all. I’ve even used the oddball Tripod and Angelfire blogs. So yeah, I’ve been all over the blogging platform world. My favorite is WordPress and frankly, I just think I’m going to stick with it for now. Maybe I can get MT working the way I want it to, but if not, oh well. WP works fine for me.

I finally found out that the problem was actually with the apostrophe that was in words of the link, not the ampersand in the link itself. *rolls eyes* I love my WordPress and honestly am not particularly inclined to use anything else. I might create an installation of MT to see if I can get it to work, but honestly, I’ve tried it on different hosts with the same results each time, so I’m not too hopeful of being able to get it working. Besides, I like doing WP themes and don’t want to have to start learning how to mess with changing layouts on MT. I won’t have time for it if I get to go back to school this fall like I’m hoping to. Most of my online time will be spent on my education at that point.

I’m working my new shift now, started today. Not too thrilled with the 10 hour day, but oh well, I guess it’s all right. At least I get 3 days a week off and they got me off on Sundays, which is good because my ride is in church when I need to be at work. So I don’t work Sundays. And…most of the concerts that come here are on Sunday, so I can go see some good shows if I’m lucky.

Wordpress is still ticking me off, but I’ve never been able to get any of the other blogging software like Movable Type to work. Besides, most hosting companies don’t allow Movable Type anymore. I could probably do Nucleus, but frankly I’m just not in the mood to deal with it.

I’m loving my new hosting now that it’s settled down a bit and is working right. And I must say it’s nice to stop getting all the spam mail about hoodia and the like. I’ve only had a few since I got to the new server and I haven’t even activated the anti-spam stuff yet.

How to make the HTML editor of WordPress NOT mess with my coding for links, I’d appreciate the insight. It’s changing the ampersand to a code that is causing me to get told my links can’t be verified and it’s pissing me off. I’ve done everything I can think of to stop it from happening, and it still happens. At this point, I’m ready to find some great hotel deals and just take off and be done with the whole thing. That’s how much it’s upsetting me.

I’ve deactivated all my plug ins and it still doesn’t work. WordPress’s support forums are no help either. It takes too long for them to answer anything.