DafyDD,

I like the look of your site. I'm in the process of setting up a blog using MT 3.2. I've purchased the software and contracted a host. I have "no" experience in blog or web design and, frankly, little interest in writing code. As your site is new and using MT 3.2. do have recommendations for blog designers?

I can be reached at riverat.tom@gmail.com if you have any suggestions.

RiverRat:

Er... ah... actually I did all the blog design and development myself, so I can't help you with any names. But thanks for the compliment!

I'm not sure, but I think Patterico and Captain Ed may have hired a site designer; and I'm quite sure that the trio at Power Line did. I don't know how local you need to be; the Minnesotans probably used someone in Minnesota, and Pat probably used someone in Southern California.

The first thing to do is get a good book on blog design (I already knew exactly what I wanted the site to look like) and design the site on paper. Once you really know what you want to do, the how is not that difficult, really.

If you plan to create your own site, as opposed to hiring someone, I would recommend Movable Type 3 Bible for reference questions. I actually got a lot of understanding out of a book that is somewhat out of date: SAMS Teach Yourself Movable Type in 24 Hours.

The SAMS book was written for the 2.x versions of Movable Type; but the basic concepts are the same in 3.2. And you will need to have (or gain) some familiarity with HTML, its extension XHTML, and the style sheet language CSS (for Cascading Stylesheets).

The power of Movable Type is that it uses the standardized and well-understood languages XHTML and CSS to construct the pages; all you have to program are the page templates. As the name implies, these are placeholder pages into which the actual data will be poured. Think of them as similar to the template part of a mail-merge document before you pour the names and addresses and such into it.

I recommend that anyone who is able to handle the technical stuff and has some time to invest build his own blog, rather than hire it out. That way, you can keep changing things, improving the blog, adding new functionality when you stumble across it, because you'll actually understand the innards of the blog itself.

If you decide to do that, and if you have questions, you're welcome to post here and ask. Pretty soon, as soon as I get Outlook up and running, I'll implement the e-mail function here, and you can e-mail me with questions. Also, a couple of resources that I've found invaluable are the online manual for 3.2 and the Movable Type Forums on Six Apart's web site.

And one last thing I discovered: if you have a specific problem, you can Google something like "movable.type.3.2 sidebar tutorial" and get a lot of very useful hits! Lots of folks have written tutorials about Movable Type, and they're often better than the books.

Good luck!

Dafydd

Dang, a "Good News" catagory, huh? I guess I'll have to change you from one of my "visit every once in a while" blogs to a "visit every day" blog. If you keep this up, you might make into my most esteemed catagory, the "visit long and often" blogs. By the way, as a "Cowboy" I appreciate the straight-shooting I see when I read your topical pieces. Speaking of topics, this next is off-topic...

The reason I like the future "Justice Miers"?
I heard that when she visits the ranch in Crawford she doesn't sit around with the ladies in the parlor and gossip; she gets out with "W" and his posse and clears brush with the best of them. We could use a justice with blisters on her hands from helping out a friend.

We've got a military that is just chock full of such people and it would be nice to see more of them in Washington DC.

Bring on the "GOOD NEWS"!

Ditto on the Dang...Bring on 'Da "GOOD NEWS"!!!

Dafydd... some good news everyone should read.

Michael Yon’s latest post, The Battle for Mosul IV, is up - and if I know readers here, probably many have already read it. But, if not, it is probably Yon’s best to date - a story of winning, in spite of the abject tales of woe shoveled daily by the MSM.

Iraqis are winning too - they’ve had a belly full of the ‘cockroaches’ (as terrorists are termed in one place in Yon’s story) that have targeted their children - and they’ve helped bring terrorists to near immediate death or capture, almost as soon as they arrive in town.

This is a serious story about a deadly serious people that have risen above the odds against them, and the story about our troops that lead them toward self sufficiency. This is the kind of story no MSM will, or probably could, tell.

Hope you enjoy...

8^)

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