now 140 pixels wider! (that’s 17.5%!)

a couple of people mentioned to me that my comment preview button was no longer working after my upgrade to movable type 4.2. after googling the error message and variations on it a few times, i discovered some things had changed and i needed to update some stuff. i started that, then i discovered i had a number of system templates missing. what to do? well, i could restore to default, or refresh. refresh sounded like a safe option…certainly better than restoring the default…what with the custom config to make my blog look unique. i hit refresh and…there were all the default templates. huh.
apparently the difference between restore to default and refresh is that restore wipes the slate clean and leaves you with only the unmodified default templates while refresh replaces all default templates with the unmodified defaults but doesn’t wipe user-created templates. that’s not exactly what i thought it meant.
fortunately, it asked if i wanted to backup templates before refreshing and i agreed, so i had copies of the templates it overwrote. but that meant i had a generic blog with none of my customizations. i could move the old stuff back and still have some broken parts, or i could take my changed versions and incorporate the changes into the latest templates.
i chose the latter, and spent several hours today working on it. while making the changes, i also chose to go to a 3-column format instead of 2. which means the blog got wider. hopefully people who read my blog are hip and with the times and have monitors set to handle a screen size larger than 800×600. (or enjoy horizontal scrolling. freaks.) i’ve gotten most of the css decent on the main page, but the archives/comments stuff is crap. i’m working on that.
i’ve got some stuff to blog about, but i’m going to go back to working on the blog css and templates.