UPDATE: Success! I've found that by switching over to using the Publish Queue, I can manage to rebuild my entire site. Of course, it's not done yet. So far, the publish queue has only made it back to the entries for April 2007. In fact, this update may not show up until the very end. But for now, using the publish queue rather than immediately publishing seems to be the way for me to go. Of course this means there will be a slight lag time (up to fifteen minutes) before a submitted comment will show up. Ah well. I can't have everything!
I've decided that it's finally time to upgrade my blog to Movable Type 4. I've been putting this off, as I wasn't sure I wanted to go through the hassle involved. But recently, I've looked at a few new features that are incompatible with MT 3.x. So I decided it was time to make the switch.
Let me just say that if Six Apart plans to stay in business, they need to make certain aspects of upgrading between major versions of MT much easier. I decided that it would be better for me to just go ahead and blow away all my old MT 3.x templates and start fresh. The problem with this is that Six Apart provides no easy way to just tell MT 4.x, "Hey, take this existing blog, get rid of all its old templates, and start with a fresh batch of MT 4.0 basic templates." Instead, I had to manually create most of the new templates. (I was able to shoehorn in the five or six templates that actualy kept the same name between MT 3.x and MT 4.x using the "Refresh Template" option.) This meant creating a brand new blog and starting the comparison and revision process.
Now I just have to go back and add back in some of the extras I added to my templates, like the Sitemeter code, the MyBlogLog Widget, and a couple of other things. Of course, I'm also thinking about getting rid of some of the add-ons (like Jiglu) as MT 4.x now offers similar features directly.
Of coures, I also need to figure out why my server won't let me rebuild the entire site.
For my readers (all six of you), this upgrade means a couple things:
1. Any links from your site to posts on my blog are broken. The way MT 4.0 structures everything has changed. (Apparently, they decided to structure things more like Blogger and WordPres do.)
2. My blog only allows authenticated comments now. Now that MT 4.x offers many options for comment authentication, I decided to kill spam for good and turn off "anonymous" comments. The good news is that there's support to leave a comment using your login from Typepad/Typekey, Livejournal, Blogger, and any other service that offers OpenID authentication. Also, I'm allowing people to register an account directly with my blog. So there's plenty of options for commenting.
So please bear with me for the next week or so if there seems to be any issues. Hopefully, I'll get things straightened out from this upgrade quickly.
(Special thanks to Peter Griffin for the public domain image used in this post.)
Hey, I like! What do you think?
Sometimes technology is frustrating...but usually it's worth it in the end.
FYI from what I can tell, a person can't actually use their Blogger login here...blogger id's aren't openid, but a person can get an openid and use it on blogger or here.
I really haven't decided yet, Angel. I'm currently annoyed because I can't seem to get everything to republish. But that could be a problem with my hosting provider. (It's been my experience that their servers don't handle long-running scripts very well.)
Also, the new dashboard (which has some features that don't work in Firefox, I might note) will take some getting used to. But I'll wait and see.
Erin: For some strange reason, MT decided your comment was spam. How strange! But I now have you listed as a trusted commenter.
I did a bit of research on Blogger and OpenID. According to Google, you can use your Blogger/Google account as an OpenID service. However, I found that the link they told me to use didn't actually work. How bizarre! But hey, that's Google for you. ;)
Well, you know me, spam is my middle name!
I didn't know that about blogger being an open id login...good to know.
Spam? And here I thought your middle name was heretic! ;)
Well, like I said, I didn't figure out how to make it work. So caveat emptor! Or however it's spelled!
By the way, I have to admit that I do like the ability to reply to comments from the dashboard. Handy!