4.0 is a massive change from the 2-3.0 years. First of all, the new UI is really ugly. Color-wise, it's a mess. There's a black bar at the top that uses green text, then your actual input windows are all light-blue with black or blue text. And there's a big orange "Write Entry" button. Guh? The previous version did everything in pastel blues and greens. Regardless of your feeling towards pastels, it felt like a unified presentation. Also, there's no design to the new look. The only graphic element is the wrench in the MT logo. I don't get it... where did the classiness go?

There's some weirdness in the menu bars, but probably nothing that I won't get used to. There is an effort to categorize the typical weblog publishing tools as either Create, Manage, or Design... and come on, there's not a lot of functional difference between those three words. It's splitting hairs. Writing a new entry (assuming you didn't use that awful orange button) is under Create. Writing a new template is under Design. If you want to see all of your entries (which I do a lot because I always have a handful of unfinished posts in progress), that's under Manage.

Really, if I could stomach the looks-like-puke stuff you get with joints like Blogger, I probably wouldn't even bother with Movable Type. Because I hate installing and upgrading it. It's just enough outside of my expertise that I always screw something up. Last time I worked on MT, I paid to have them do the install (especially because I wanted to change my database from Berkeley to MySQL, and I simply could not be responsible for doing that.)

But I attempted the upgrade myself... in theory you just have to FTP a new set of files, right? Make sure the cgis all have execute permission, tell 4.0 where your MySQL database lives, nothing too difficult. Then I tried to do a weblog rebuild and received a template error. I sent out a support request to Six Apart, the Movable Type people. Since, back when I paid for the install service, I also bought a year of tech support.

They kinda solved my problem... one of the MT template tags had been changed in 4.0 and once I altered my code the rebuild went through. But get this: my $50 year of support is only for 3.X installs, not 4.0. What kind of shit is that? I buy your product, I upgrade to the latest version of your product (based on the insistent little Upgrade Now! memos that appear in my MT News feed), and then find out that my tech support no longer applies? So I get a stern talking to about how I should either buy another $50 year of support for 4.0 or consult the user forums for future assistance. That pretty much pissed me off.

Then I discovered that my TypeKey comment system was dead. You can click the SIGN IN button, you can input your TypeKey account, but you never successfully get back to fourhman.com to actually comment. Instead you get "An error occurred: Null filename used at (eval 39) line 1." Brrrrrrroken. So, now tech support-less, I wasted a lot of effort trying to figure out why TypeKey broke in 4.0. I rebuilt my site javascript, tried numerous coding tweaks, re-uploaded the cgi files. I even briefly implemented the generic 4.0 default templates - meaning that, for about an hour, fourhman.com looked like the shittiest of 1997-era weblogs - only to find out, hilariously, that nothing in the default templates implements TypeKey. Even if it is activated inside your weblog settings.

In fact, almost nothing in the 4.0 documentation mentions TypeKey, except to point out how awesome it is and how free it is. Nowhere in 4.0 is there a "Follow these steps to add TypeKey authentication to your site," at least, not that I can find, and I totally entered "TypeKey" into the search box.

So that is still busted. Not sure what I'm going to do about that, since I'm the only person on the planet with this problem.

Last night I decided to lump it and revert back to Movable Type 3.3X. So I re-uploaded the 3 install. Didn't work. I got the 3.3X UI to return, but it said I had no weblogs (although I could still find them) and the templates would not load.

So I think, hey, I'll ask my super happy friendly DreamHost Team to flash my webspace back to what it looked like a week ago, when 3.3X worked. They did it for me once before. This time I get a reply saying that DreamHost has a new feature that lets users do that sort of thing on their own. Cool, I guess. So I find the hidden backups for fourhman.com two weeks ago... but the backup is for the end of that week, after I had already implemented 4.0. And that's as far back as the backups go.

I did it anyway. And now I am right back where I started, with a non-working comment system and a 4.0 that I don't much like. I mean, there's a few things I like, for example the automatic image popup code and the preview function is much improved... but it's still assface ugly and I want my commenting back.

It looks like I'm going to have to spend another $50 to get 4.0 tech support. Either that or bug DreamHost for any possibility of hidden backups older than not-quite-two weeks ago.

It's almost enough to make all that LiveJournal Blogspot manure look like genius.