My blog looks very different from what it used to be. That's because I wiped out all of my customizations while upgrading to Movable Type version 3.3. I had been on version 2.61 for a long time, because Six Apart (the company that makes Movable Type) started charging for their blogging software a few years ago. They still had a free version, but it only allowed one author, which was too restrictive for me.
But Donna has been veritably inundated with comment spam recently (100+ per day), so I went looking for remedies. When I checked the Six Apart website, it appeared the current free version (version 3.3) did allow for multiple authors and multiple blogs. It also is apparently better at combating spam.
So I downloaded it, installed it, and transferred my history to the new version. It was all surprisingly smooth, except for the quotation marks in the old entries being converted to some non-web-compatible characters. I just had to use a text editor to replace those quotes with their plain counterparts and it worked OK.
I converted my blog first to make sure I could do it cleanly. We'll see what spam comments I get with the standard 3.3 installation. I'll soon convert Donna's blogs, and implement whatever additional spam blocking techniques need to be used. The final result should be that we have a much cleaner and usable website.