I'm using the provided index template (with the only modifications to add my links in the sidebar) and the Gettysburg stylesheet (with the only modifications to change the body text color, the banner background color, and the sidebar width).

I tend to use blockquote quite a bit, though I never end an entry on a blockquote -- I always have a paragraph of text afterwards. (This is an old Blogger habit.) Normally, when displaying my blog, MT inserts a blank line between the end of an entry's text and the author information. However, if the last paragraph is a normal paragraph following a blockquote, then MT doesn't insert that blank line, and so my author information is immediately below the end of the entry text. I'm using a couple of br's to fix this for now, but that seems like a hack. Can someone help?

Also, on a related topic, when editing in MT, blockquotes seem to cause some strange display issues -- the first paragraph of a blockquoted section and the first paragraph of a normal section of text following a blockquote are displayed in huge fonts. It doesn't change how it's displayed in my public blog, but still, it's weird.

-- Frank

pseudorandom (my blog)

One thing that is completely whacked is that you don't have any closing </blockquote> tags. I guess that if you never have a 2-paragraph blockquote, the browser may be able to recover from this error, but it's gonna mess up pretty badly in general.

What the HTML output ought to look like is

It is a little tricky to get that with the default "Convert Linebreaks" filter in MT. You might want to look into the TikiText or Textile filters as alternatives. Personally, when I find I have to do something tricky, I just turn the text filtering off, and enter the HTML tags by hand.

I always insert closing blockquote tags in my text, unless I'm being boneheaded. Where do you see a case where they're not showing up in a blog entry of mine?

I must be going blind. I could swear that there were unclosed blockquotes when I did a "view source" on your blog yesterday.
Today, rather than relying on my (faulty) eyesight, I ran your blog through the Validator. It had various complaints, but none about unclosed blockquotes.

My apologies.

Maybe you want to monkey with the margin-top for the posted class in your stylesheet. Or, perhaps, insert an extra <br /> into your templates.

Thanks for the reply, and for running my site through the Validator. It doesn't solve my problem, but it gives me much to chew on...

It's not creating a <p> tag after the </blockquote> tag -- try leaving a blank line after the tag before starting the next paragraph.