e-taxes and apache, perl, and httpd.conf

Filed b’s fed and state taxes electronically tonight. It will be nice to get that refund direct-deposited. Still need to work out my more complicated finances (I’m waaay late in sending out my 1099-MISC’s, put it that way!). Still, it feels good to accomplish something.
Decided to stop waiting and downloaded movabletype to my Mac. In theory I should be able to install it on the Apache server runnning under Darwin. The documentation with mt is very good, but I’m still a novice at this stuff. I found the path for perl at made sure it was correct in the various .cgi files. I updated the .cfg file to install mt. Then I tried running mt-load.cgi and saw the contents of the script instead of some action. Apparently this means that I don’t have CGI scripting enables. So I went off looking for httpd.conf and found instead only an http_conf.pm file (that OS X mistakenly sees as some kind of graphics format suitable for its graphics converter utility).
Apparently this file generates the http.conf, but how? It’s in perl I assume. This makes me think that my Apache server is not really fully up and running (although shacker showed me how PHP was working there, so frankly I’m just confused). Also, it seems that anything I put in my Sites folder on the Mac should be served up by the local web server, but that also does not seem to be the case. I feel like I’m very close but that there’s still a few things I need to figure out to get this baby humming.