Life as an Artificial Lifeform

Well well. It had to be done at one point I just thought I could put it off until I am finished with school and have a bit more time at hand. I upgraded the prototypen.com blog software to movable types 3.2. As said before I was looking into migrating to a nonproperitory solution but this would have cost me even more time and all other solutions out there are just not so well when you have a multiblog/multiauthor environment and I just want this to work without having to adjust things all the time - because if I hate one thing then its webdesign and programming. Because of the older blacklist version ceased to function the only other viable solution was to upgrade. I can not say how much pain it still was. I don´t know what the people at sixapart smoke all day but to change EACH AND EVERY CSS HOOK made "moving the templates to the new version" just not possible - the comments wouldn´t work or this and that would not work - you might even think that they made it on purpose to sell more "service contracts" that offer you painless upgrades. Not only did they change every CSS class name the new names utterly made no sense whatsoever calling the side navigation "beta" is the most stupid thing I have ever heard - you always think its something that is in beta and has not been fully implemented - logic descriptions that could be readable by other people seem not to be in the knowledge base of the movable type originators. To make things worse - all my old templates lost there formatting leaving me with a garbled mess of code (and I do style my code so I can change it later on). And then there is something called "clever commenting" that makes other people read your code easier - especially when you absolutely know that other people need to understand your code in order for your program that you sell for lots of money to work. Needless to say that there was only rudimentary commenting in place - and most seemed to be left in for the programmer himself as it the codes and shortcuts seemed utterly non understandable.
So for all you out there looking for a blogging solution - Six Aparts Movable Type is NOT IT. I am stuck with it and I hate it and throwing money into their mouth is really not the thing I really wanted to do in the first place but could not circumvent - if I can help that they are utterly destroyed tell me how and I am on the front line.
The reason why I had to upgrade - the spam plugins - while looking shining new and nice on first view do nothing different then the blacklist plugin - except for a few functions that are tied in the proprietary "Type Key" registration that is also a Six Apart project. I am utterly against any "proprietary authentication" entity and so I choose not to enable this - well I have more spam then ever - not that its filtering through to the blog because I am moderating almost all messages now but its sitting there waiting to be looked at and handpicked by me and I thought that those times would be over with the upgrade... SixApart if you read this - you have a very very very unhappy customer. Not only was I forced to pay for an upgrade from a former free version of your software your software sucks in all things that are not basic CMS especially for people wanting to alter it and people with a spam problem may a fast crash of the economy be your grave.

One positive thing is of course that I had to touch the design side of things with the blog that has not seen a design upgrade since day one. So I am not fully happy - especially do I hate fixed width websites - the new design is a bit more to my liking and I have a blog logo now - something that I always thought missing. Originally it was to become the picture on this entry (the artwork is from the cover of the KC85/III east german "home" computer that I started of with venturing into digital territory when I was nine years old) but I decided for a simpler solution and the ascii face representing the artificial life is better so I think. As for the fixed width: I will probably go into that at one point when I have more time - at the moment it has to be like this - even so it goes against all things dynamic web layouts should inherit - blame Six Apart not me.