Site Update
If you are visiting this site for the first time, you may not realize that it has been greatly improved. Of course, I fully realize that nobody actually visits this site, so no one will notice the improvements. In fact, they won't even be reading this comment. Which is the perfect seque to my new site description ("Written for an audience of cardinality zero" - much like my master's thesis).
First, my thanks to Robert Stewart for his inspiration and assistance in pointing me in this direction and in answering my questions.
1. New "look". Thanks to blogstyles.com. I am using one of the free templates (with some mods) - but I might upgrade to the fee-based ones, after all, it is only about $15-$20.
2. Reasonably consistent page viewing - whether in the main, a category archive, a monthly archive, or an individual item. The <MTInclude> tag is a wonderful thing.
3. My first use of a plug-in (Related Entries, found on individual entry sites) and also the use of the plugin manager. The installation was a little bumpy for me - but one thing that Robert reminded me about was to change the "shebang" line on my mt-pm.cgi file to something that works on Windows (namely "#!C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe -w"). Of course this is well explained here. I did run into some problems getting the "Related Entries" plugin installed via the plug in manager, but others worked fine.
I now look forward to exploring some of the other plugins and perhaps creating more useful content. Of course, this is greatly hindered by having a job :).