h’okay…that took a bit of time. after some deliberation about the best approach to upgrading the myriad of customizations i did to the original template, my best solution was:
1. save out the database.
2. nuke the whole site.
3. create a new blog and import the old database.
yea…i’m that creative with my solutions. not that i could help it…they totally revamped how templates and style, etc are applied. so as of right now, i just took a pre-existing template and butchered it until it started resembling my old site. i’ll make tweaks here and there slowly til it’s more in line with my old site…friends links, about pages, color schemes, etc.