After a blog-hiatus — more about that later — I upgraded Movable Type 4.0. This hasn’t been an easy process. I keep getting outbid on disposable ungulates.
(Update: I’ve given up for now.)
First try: As a safety measure, I exported my blog contents and imported into a completely separate web site and database with RC1. Everything seemed to work, though rebuilding everything took over an hour. My old MT setup is best described as being a highly-polished turd. Rebuilding is fast because I long ago took the pains to separate out components into their logical server-side includes. For example, instead of generating the right sidebar for each entry, the web server does this at runtime. MT4’s default templates attempt to replicate an include function for each blog entry. Furthermore, their new template structures appear bordering fomplicated. For example, there’s a header template but its incomplete html is unviewable on its own. One has to concatenate at least two templates’ output to see it working.
Second try: During a trip to Houston then onto Atlanta, I performed an update on a copy of the database (and a separate URL) using Release Candidate 3. It choked on rebuilding the individual entries because several plugins are ensconced in my templates. After working through the easy stuff:
Subroutine gobberwarts redefined at /groop/i/implore/thee.pl line 42.
Dreamhost went to hell in a handbasket, as it seems to once every six months or so. This outage was slightly worse because their “emergency status page” was on a machine affected by the same problems.
Third try: The final version of MT4.0 became available last week. Since I hadn’t blogged in a while, I made the upgrade on the “production” database, effectively preserving the older plugins. I had to modify eight templates because the functions used were superseded by MT4 built-ins. When I attempted to publish this entry, I got this message:
Can’t “gruntbuggly” on a plurdled/gabbleblotchits line 4760.
Do they speak English on What?
Okay, I give up. It might be best to encase my five years’ worth of literary heresy in Lucite and start anew. I shut off comments on the old stuff, rebuilt everything, and set up an archive page. I am understandably nervous about going back to Wordpress.
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6 users have commented
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackGood to see you back-ish!
What Scout said-ish!
I continue to be impressed by your willingness to tinker, rebuild, investigate, debug, and otherwise torture yourself through different blog software/layouts/etc. Once I got mine working, I didn’t want to touch it again (it was hard enough getting the tiny customizations I wanted to work).
But as for the new blog, I like the layout and readability! (And the blog title — or am I imagining it? ;) ) The embedding of user comments inside google ads is a bit weird (at first it’s hard to tell them apart). Otherwise, looking good!
Scout, Susan: Thanks!
Kiri - thank you for catching the google ads thing. It was embedded deep within the bowels of the template I used as a starting point; since I use Firefox with the ad-blocking, it was filtered. (Ah, IE to the “rescue”)
Wow, talk about a rose-colored browser! :) I’ve held back on installing any Firefox extensions (despite how cool some of them seem) because it already seems a bit bloated, and I’ve been warned that it doesn’t manage memory well. Have you noticed any problems along these lines? What are your favorite extensions (aside from ad-blocking)?
Another small interface note: when I leave a comment, it asks for a “username” instead of a “name”. I think the latter is intended. “Username” to me suggests the act of logging in, as if it must first recognize me from my username. If you have control over this (and if you care — it’s a pretty minor thing after all), you might consider changing the form to say “Name” instead. (I think your previous version was like that.)
(Since this might be of general interest, I’m reposting an excerpt of the mail I just sent you)
I have these installed:
Adblock Filterset.G Updater — this updates Adblock from a master list.
Download statusbar — to prevent the extra window from spawning; downloads appear in the bottom menu.
Web Developer — a must if you’re trying to debug style sheets.
PDF Download — because the out-of-the-box Acrobat is so slow, this lets you choose whether to open the document in Firefox, print or download it.
Long Titles — fix the truncated “title” tags; useful for XKCD’s site. Also mine, too, when I write long parenthetical asides.
IE View — lets me right-click-open a page into Internet Explorer … if I have to.
StumbleUpon — topic based web browsing (e.g. “Cognitive science” or “lefthanded” or “politics”) for when I have some time to kill before a meeting. The plugin lets you thumbs-up pages you like, which feeds the system.
A downside of having a lot of these add-ons, especially StumbleUpon, is Firefox periodically checks for updates at startup. It annoys me to no end to have my browsing session interrupted because some obscure dot.minor.bugfix was issued, so I turn off checking (Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Update -> untick “Installed Add-ons”)
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