Recently in admin Category

A few months ago I moved this site to another server. At that point all of the "planets" that I was hosting on theplanetarium.org stopped working too because the software that I was using to build them wasn't installed on the new server. And installing it was going to be a bit of a nightmare.

But over the last few days I've written a simple system that does much the same thing. You can read more of the technical details over at my use.perl blog (which is, of course, one of the source aggregated into planet davorg).

Planet davorg is already back online. My other planets should be back over the next few days. Now I have the software, it's just a case of writing a few configuration files.

Of course, once you start aggregating stuff like this, you run into the data repetition problems that Paul Mison mentioned last week. I should be able to use the same software (or something based on it) to easily offer readers a choice of feeds containing just the content they are interested in.

Argh. I've just noticed that having rebuilt all of the entries in the blog, the URLs have all changed. For example the URL of my entry about finding Perl programmers in London has changed from http://blog.dave.org.uk/archives/2007/02/perl-programmer.html to http://blog.dave.org.uk/2007/02/perl-programmer.html. They've dropped the "archives" directory. No doubt there's a good reason for it, but until I put a some redirections in place, I'm going to have lost all the Googlejuice that those entries used to have. And all the Technorati pings too.

I'm beginning to wish I'd just stuck with the old version of the software.

I promise to get back to blogging about something other than my blog any day now.

I've had a bit of a play, and I'm not convinced that Movable Type Open Source 4.1 is quite as stable as Six Apart want us to think it is.

Yesterday I was having trouble publishing pages. I was getting timeouts which were leading to 500 errors. I still haven't been able to republish all of the old entries that I imported over the weekend.

I've had this problem before when upgrading MT and one cause seems to be incompatibilities between older page templates and newer versions of MT. I hadn't made too many changes to the templates (since the last time I upgraded) so I reset all of the templates to the defaults and started again.

At that point it looked like I was able to publish pages without getting 500 errors. But the pages I was publishing were all missing the various bits of information that appear on the right-hand side of the page. A bit of digging revealed that this version of MT uses something called widget sets to determine what is in that part of the page and that my default set of templates had no widget sets defined. That was pretty easy to fix (although it still needs a bit of tweaking - the "About this page" widget, for example, looks broken when it appears on the main index page).

Also, and throughout all of this tweaking the blog continuously seemed to forget the minimalist white theme that I had applied and reset itself to the minimalist red version that seems to be the default. I'm sticking with that until I get far closer to the finished design.

So, at this point it looked like I could publish pages (albeit slowly) and that they had approximately the correct widgets on them. Before going to the hassle of republishing all 1,400 entries I thought I'd add my Google Analytics tracking code to the templates.

And at that point it starts going wrong again. I've started getting 500 errors again when I publish a page. Maybe it's the Google Analytics code that's doing it, but I can't really see how a bit of Javascript can cause this problem.

So currently I have a blog that is has about 400 completely unpublished entries, about a thousand entries that are published but that have no Google Analytics code and are missing the page widgets and about twenty entries that look approximately as I want them (but in the wrong colour). And that's before I start thinking about the category and archive pages.

Oh, and the search program seems to take over all of the CPU whenever it's run, thereby bringing the system to its knees. And publishing any page (which includes adding a comment) will give a 500 error.

I've used Movable Type for a long time. I've always been a big fan. But why is upgrading it such a problem? I've spent so much time fixing the upgrade that I haven't had time to write about anything other than the upgrades. That's really not what this blog is supposed to about.

I'm sure the this new version looks great if you're starting a blog from scratch. But for people upgrading a blog that has been going for a few years, it all looks like a bit of a pain.

Of course, with the new Open Source version of MT, it's finally fine for me to go in and fix these problems myself. But I'm not really interested in writing blog software. Blog software should be a tool that I can just use. When maintaining a tool take more time than using the tool then you have to wonder if you're using the right tool.

Maybe I'll have another look at WordPress. Or Blogger.

The hard disk that my old blog entries live on (along with a few other web sites) is still looking rather ill. It's apparently possible to prod it in a certain manner and get it to work for a few hours until it gets tired again. The hard part is persuading the tech support people at the hosting company to perform the prodding ceremony.

As a result, I seem to be getting three or four hour's access to it every four or five days.

Last night it came back again and I used the time wisely be getting a dump of the database that contains the blog.

So I now have a backup of all of the previous entries together with the comments and trackbacks (remember trackbacks?) The next step is to get them into my new blog's database.

Now there's a slight problem there of course. I assume that the new blog entries will have been generated with the same primary keys as the first few entries in the old blog. And as there will be a unique index on the entries table I can't just load the old data into the new database.

Currently I'm thinking that I should update the primary keys in the new database[1] so that they are greater than any of the old keys. But the Movable Type database is a large and complex beast. There will almost certainly be more than one primary key sequence to deal with and a large number of foreign key relationships to keep in step.

Sounds like a lot of fun. But it should be a reasonably mechanical task so I think there's a good chance that I'll have anything back by the end of the weekend. Don't hold me to that though.

Is there anyone reading this who has attempted something like this before? Am I mad to do it the way I've described above? Is there a simpler method?

Any advice would really be appreciated.

[1] Thereby breaking one of the fundamental rules of database design - primary keys should be immutable.

Nothing much in it yet. All of the old content was on a disk which seems to have failed and I don't have a backup (please don't bother telling me how stupid that was - believe me, I know).

There's still a chance that I'll be able to get the old stuff back so it might get backfilled at some point. In the meantime, it's strangely liberating to be starting again from scratch.

Oh, and installing MT 4.01 from scratch was really slick. They've certainly done a lot of work on making that as easy as possible.