I hate CAPTCHAs. I had a problem with mine for a while. I emailed Blogger, who sent me an acknowledgement email, and then I haven't heard from them.

But the CAPTCHA works - so far as I know.

This is a reality check.

I have learned a valuable lesson from your mostly negative experience. I am way to non-geek to ever try and do something like this on my own. I'll leave it for those who are far more adventurous than I am.

I may not like Blogger's limitations, but I do like the fact that if something goes wrong, THEY have to fix it.

LynLass,

I hear you. I left Blogger and TypePad because while they had features I liked, at the time they did not have all of the features I wanted.

Further, I didn't want a change in a business' terms of service to limit my subject matter or the ownership of my own words.

If I was starting today, I would probably stick with Blogger. Everything I wanted 4 years ago is part of what they offer today, and fully for free.

~S

French,

I'm not a huge fan of CATCHA's myself, I just am growing weary of deleting 20-100 spam comments daily.

Right now, with comments in moderation, at least they don't get published to my front page or to my feed.

Thanks for bearing with me through the changes.

I really appreciate it.

~Soulless

LynLass,

I've thought more about my situation and my earlier response, and I wanted to clarify things a bit.

All software is pretty complex. MovableType does fundamentally what I want it to do, and in a way that is easy to understand.

They have purchased and integrated several disparate and distinct products and have done loads of work to integrate them.

The current version of the software is good.

My complaint is that with this new latest version of the software, I don't feel that I was given enough information about the issues I could experience upgrading from the previous version.

I upgraded early on, so to be fair, they may not have known everything that could go wrong, or why.

To muddy matters further, my host just recently upgraded the server my web pages come from. Today, it's lightning fast. I'm grateful. So now I wonder if the issues I had mid-week weren't also related to this.

But mostly the big issue I have today is that MovableType has moved on to a much different template model than they had when I started this. The cool thing is that they have modules that you can plug in, or options you can turn on or off. The sucky thing is that my ancient templates have to be tweaked a lot and the modules have to be shoved in edgewise for the new features to work. What I mean is, there is more work than just adding the module, and that's what I have come up against in this go-round.

What I would like to do ultimately is to use all of the current templates, but to learn to modify the style of the site to more or less the way it looks now.

If I have any sense, I will do this all "offline" and then plug it in to the main site when it's all ready.

It only recently occurred to me that I have a lot to loose if I wreck things: more than 2600 entries and more than 2100 comments over the last 5 years.

So now I get crankier when things don't work, and I realize that I have to be more responsible with regard to the changes I make.

And SixApart? I eagerly await some sort of information about the template tags that don't work anymore, and the way to bring my current templates into the 21st century.

Thank you!

~Soulless