Site upgrade update

* After much tinkering over the past two days I’ve settled for the moment on a modified version of Lilia Ahner’s style Stevenson from the Movable Type style library. Fonts are bigger than in the first Wednesday design, and readability better, but I’m still hearing from readers saying they’d like access to a style-switch or font-enlargement option. Anyone know of one that’s easy to install on a MT site?

* TrackBacks are back, at least for the moment. MT 3.2 supports TrackBack preapproval, and it remains to be seen whether the former rate of 200+ spams a day will resume now that TrackBacks do not appear automatically.

* I’ve installed a handy new archives page collecting links to archives through mid-2003 (earlier archives are here), and fixed (via redirects) the broken URLs on monthly and category archives generated by the earlier version of Movable Type. That still leaves a problem with the 2,700 or so individual links generated by the earlier version, each of which now exists in two versions: a new descriptive-word-URL version, and the old numbered-individual-URL version. Rather than let the old links break, I moved the whole lot of them to the new site via FTP, but this leaves two problems: 1) each exists in two versions now, which is likely to confuse the many visitors who reach this page via search engines; 2) the old version now fails to display styles properly. The logical next step would be to install redirects for all the old URLs, but MT seems unable to generate a simple list mapping old onto new posts for this purpose. If any technically inclined readers can help out on this, drop me a line.

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