A huge thanks to Mike Ditto , a Denver blogger who volunteered to reinstall the comment spammer MT-Blacklist on TalkLeft. That was the last hurdle to our site upgrade. He also insisted on doing it for free.

So, this weekend's fund drive is over....We collected $140.00 and sent the excess to Mike even though he didn't want it. A big thanks to Jay Allen, creator of MT-Blacklist, who also offered to do the re-install for TalkLeft, but since he's visiting New York this week (his home is in Budapest, Hungary), I'm glad I didn't have to take him up on the offer.

If you're considering moving your blog to Movable Type, or upgrading to MT 3.11, I highly recommend letting them do the install. Sarah did our's and it works great. She was also very responsive to emails.

I also needed some help from TalkLeft's great hosting company, Hosting Matters, which responded right away(thanks, Stacy.)

The cool html buttons that now enable readers to post links in comments through the entry pages without typing html code were made possible a few months back by Helen and Jeff of Protein Wisdom, also from Denver, who graciously shared the code and spent hours helping me figure out how to incorporate it into TalkLeft. I met Mike, Jeff and Helen (and many others) at the Rocky Mountain Blogger Bash last May--it's really something how bloggers kick in to help when you need it--even when, like Jeff, they disagree with almost every word I write.

If you're looking for great free blog design tricks, like including quotes in a color lined box, TalkLeft's come from Mandarin Design. Meg even will help you via e-mail if you run into a snag.

I'm done playing techie for now. The concentration required over tiny details is exhausting. Much more so than blogging. Again, I really appreciate the financial contributions from you readers. I hope you like the changes. Let me know if you run across any bugs.