Hosted Site Running

Over the last 10 days, I have been working on installing Movable Type and transferring the Web log to my own hosted web site. You are in fact reading this Blog in its new location. Entering www.sea-of-flowers.ca in the browser navigation bar brought you to a new Welcome page. The new location of the Sea of Flowers blog is www.sea-of-flowers.ca/weblog/sea/
Follow this link. Then please add the page to Favourites or Bookmarks the usual way.

When I started my Blog at Typepad and registered sea-of-flowers.ca as a domain in early April 2004, I redirected requests for www.sea-of-flowers.ca to my blog at Typepad. When I got my hosted web space, I installed MT and imported all the entries from this blog to the updated Sea of Flowers blog. I set up a Web page at the root level of the sea-of-flowers domain, which contains a link to the new location of the Sea of Flowers blog.
I have tried to go through the links in the post bodies to make sure they still work. I have a few links back to my own posts on the Typepad version of the blog, and I’m trying to edit them to point to the new hosted version (which should be around for a long time after I wind up my Typepad account).
I’m discovering that MT can be configured, but it takes some work. I was working on the Typepad service, which is run by the people who make MT, and there are a lot of parallels.
One difference is that the Typepad service has a stylesheet editor built in at their server, which is not part of MT. MT ships with some basic templates and stylesheets, and lets the user enter codes to modify the look and feel of the presentation. I have played with this to get a familiar look and to learn about customizing, but it’s a distraction from working on content.
Part of the difference is that MT does not handle lists of blogs and web links the same way. Typepad permits the creation of central “Typelists” which can be added to any blog owned by a user. MT requires some coding to create and display a link list in the blog sidebar.
I may deal with this by posting links, with my comments, on a links and resources page on my Web site instead of a list in the blog sidebar. It will depend on how much work is involved in getting the Web site up, as opposed to adding links on the sidebar. If you don’t see yourself listed in the links right away – or if there are no friends or links lists in the sidebar, that’s where things stand today.