Yet for all this talk, I still can't find concrete information about how to use FrontPage as an easy blogging tool. The FP site says that FP 2003 has tools for creating "web logs and home pages" but doesn't exactly say what these are. Does it make creating a Movable Type or Blogger style page easy and simple in FP? I have FP 2000 and was considering an update if it had a blog template I could just open up, upload my CSS and be done with it.

I'm amazed that Gates is so far behind on the blogging toolset. You would think that with the XBox, his treatment of Netscape, Xerox, and Apple in the past when Blogger and MT started reaching large numbers he would have put out some free "lite" version of FP for blogging.

So there's a lot of talk, but not a lot of visible action.

This is slightly off topic, but let me clarify that FrontPage isn't a good blogging tool, for the same reason that a hammer isn't good at cutting wood.

Sure, if you sharpen the claw and do it real carefully, you can cut wood with a hammer, but it's really not the right tool, and even if MS sharpens the claw, it's never going to be even a passable blogging tool. Blogging entails soooo much more than HTML editing, and that's really what FP does. The dynamic management of content is the appeal of a blog, and FP isn't, and never will be designed to do that. You're looking at the wrong tool for the job, and you're frustrated that it won't perform.

After watching your woes of recent I'm inclined to encourage you to invest in a TypePad subscription (www.typepad.com). You could get the base subscription to start, which is $4.95 and use the "LAUNCH" special to get 10% off for life. As you wanted more features you could upgrade it to higher accounts.

TypePad takes all the headache out of the technical and management nightmares you've been experiencing. I suspect 20 min with TypePad and you'd happily cut 1 CD/mo from your budget to pay for your TypePad subscription.

A short history... I wrote my own blog tool, completely from scratch. It was a wonder to behold, it had a windows application that I used to manage the posts, I could easily post from it, and the blog engine itself worked beautifully and did nearly everything that TypePad did.

But I decided to try the free month of TypePad so I could check it out, get some ideas for my own blog tool and it literally took me 5 minutes before I scrapped the weeks of work it took to build my own tool and just went with TypePad. Soooooo much easier, and all the technical and management nightmares were off my back.

And here's the key **I could now concentrate on doing what I wanted a blog for in the first place** namely, publishing entries. It wasn't to hassle with the technical stuff.... even me, yes, Mr. "hassles with the technical stuff for a living." I was only too happy to pass all the headache on to someone else. I suggest you do the same.

Try it for a month, on a lark, it's free. Plus you can import all your MT entries.

I suspect you'll thank me.