Ok, I entered the weblog arena rather late. Initially I probably did not estimate the consequences correctly. For me blogging meant users who sat down in the evening for telling the world about their daily problems. There were cooking recipes here, and essays about presidential elections there. Sometimes interesting, sometimes boring - but nothing I was interested in doing myself.

When working and reading in the internet you can hardly avoid finding weblogs all over the place. Sometimes I quickly move on, sometimes I start reading a bit. But starting a weblog myself? I really had no interest in this.

This month I had found the way to Six Apart. Six Apart is a company offering products and services which can be used for creating weblogs. There you can find Type Pad and Movable Type.

Type Pad is a service in the internet. With its help anybody can start a weblog immediately. You do not need your own hardware or software. You will use Six Apart's hardware and software which is offered for a monthly fee.

Movable Type is the basic software. You can buy it, install it on your own server and use it for creating weblogs.

Currently I primarily regard Movable Type an extraordinary type of software. For me it is not a tool for showing my limited writing quality to the internet community. It is a piece of software which really succeeded in changing the world substantially. I have only seen similar events twice. That has been the change how software for Microsoft Windows could be developed when Visual Basic made its way. And of course it was the moment when Google suddenly became the most important search engine.

As I wanted to learn the software I did not register for a Type Pad account. Instead, I bought the software and installed it on my own internet server. As I belong to the MS Windows community, my server is a MS Windows 2003 Server. This had almost stopped all my enthusiasm for Movable Type. Installing Movable Type on a Windows 2003 Server is a small adventure and it is not described in the detailed documentation.

The installation was laborious. As I continuously had to investigate some details, the installation lasted quite long. It was no usual process like "executing an MSI and clicking OK four times". But finally I succeeded, even though I as a software developer have nothing to do with UNIX and Perl.

As I have not found a detailed description, I am going to write an installation guide for Windows 2003 next. Looking back the installation has not been that difficult. It only was not documented enough. You should be able to perform a full installation in less than an hour.

Let's see, when I have time and pleasure for writing again.

mgs | 02/25/2005

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I read your message in Movable Type Forum and decide to see how your blog look like. I really like the way you introducing your problems and how to solve it step-by-step which is very helpful for someone like me a novice in web-blog publishing.

Keep up your wonderful work and spread your knowledge to the world!

Alixky, thanks a lot for your kind words. I am glad that you could use these tutorials for your work. And don't forget: if you have a weblog of your own, you can help me spread this weblog by linking to it. Thank you.

I'm still learning how to customize my tmpl and function of mt. Your web-blog will be definitely one of my favourite pernament link. I also really like your search engine MTLookup if possible, could you please send me the code via my email. Thank you very much.