Its the dang mime type!
Well, after consulting with micah yesterday evening, i discovered that the stupid layout problems with MT were not unique to me, and so i started doing a bit of research into why things looked so blechie. turns out the dang thing wasn’t reading the css file, as a result of the mime type not being configured on the server end. so i added a wee bit of text to the htaccess file, and viola! a blog emerges from the nasty text zone. go figure.
