This Blog Goes to 11

This is my first blog posting using Movable Type. I wasn't sure what the learning curve was going to be (now I wasn't expecting it to be rocket science), so I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. Was it going to be really easy to do, or would I have to wade through page after page just to make a simple post? Well, my first impressions are that it is a pretty intuitive platform (although, It doesn't hurt that I share an office with Brad who can answer any questions that I have). It's simple, yet not overly so, and offers a good deal of configuration options and settings that allow me to customize it to my liking. Some of these options I am going to need to explore in more detail and will probably be more useful after I have more posts under my belt. But for a first time, I have to say that this was a pretty smooth experience.

I was going to write about how I just used StyleCatcher to select a design for my blog page, but then I thought that that should be its own blog post. See, I have to get myself in that mindset - kind of a blog think (sounds a bit Orwellian) I suppose. But without spoiling my next blog, I found the StyleCatcher tool to be easy to use, although I wouldn't have known about it if Brad hadn't mentioned it. I am sure I would have stumbled across it at some point - probably when I'm just clicking on links to see what they do. But that's how you learn, I guess.

Well, I guess it's time to see what else I can do on here. Hmmm. Feed widgets. Let's see what those are...

I am attending the demo that Elizabeth and Brad are giving on using Movable Type for blogging, and I've already learned some new things. First off, I noticed that I had a comment from Cole, but I could only view it when I went to the MT publishing interface. It wasn't showing up on my site. His comment was listed as unpublished, and it was waiting for me to "approve" it by actually publishing it onto my site. So I did that. Little did I know that I could set up my site to display comments automatically. Another thing that I noticed was that there was nowhere to tag my posts. This was another quick fix.

Underneath the "Entry Body" box on the weblog entry page is a little link that reads "Customize the display of this page." Clicking that link gave me a slew of options for this entry page such as adding tags and automatically allowing comments to be published. Like I said before, this stuff isn't rocket science, and I probably would have figured it out at some point, but there still is a learning curve to doing all of this.

Now we're hearing about uploading images. Simple to do, yet it's not quite a no brainer either. Do I use pop-up or embedded image? Do I need to create a thumbnail? And I just found out that I can use the embed code (if I have it) from sites such as Flickr or YouTube to upload images or content as well. This is some really cool stuff, and something I am looking forward to experimenting with as time goes on.

Hopefully as I go along and learn more and become more experienced with doing all of this, I will be able to have a more dynamic site. I want this to be fun not only for me, but for anyone visiting my site or subscribing to my feed. I'm excited to see what I can do with it.