Sorry about the lack of sidebar for a few hours today, IE users. 4 hours later, much googling, and mulish stubborness generated a workaround for IE's non-standard CSS. Use firefox like I do! It's got some really nifty features- tabbed browsing, pop-up blocker, and excellent standards compliance (unlike IE. GRRRRR)
If your eagle eyes have spotted some differences in the layout of the blog, then your eyes are sharp indeed. Movable Type 3.1 came out today and after upgrading, my index page looked like... *shudder* I don't want to remember. After quite a few hours, I managed to get my templates to behave again. I guess this is what you get when you use pre-packaged solutions. Hmrph. While at it, I also changed the body text a bit making it easier for tired eagle eyes to read.
MT 3.x came with all this newfalngled commenting stuff which they had hoped would keep spammers out, more control of comments, and login once- comment everywhere like blogger or LJ. If readers (that's you) ever click to leave a comment, you'll see that it is a bit different now. Comment approval is turned on to keep the blog free from icky spam. This did involve updating several files (virtually all my templates have been updated with current default templates) and merging the index and archive templates. Not so fun. To those of you who want to implement the new comment features, you'll need to download your current templates, download the new templates, run a diff, then merge.
Enjoy.