Well, I’ve made more progress.  I can now successfully build my main indexes and entries statically.  This means that comments will show up immediately now.  I’m still running the monthly and category archives through the publish queue, though.  I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

To get things to work better, I’ve made a few changes, including caching widgets, enabling some widgets as server-side includes (I discovered the beauty of SSI when I started Ingvi’s Corner, and am glad to use them here), and changed my archive widgets so they don’t display a count for each category/monthly archive.  (I figure part of the problem was that trying to generate this data for each page was really thrashing the script’s interface to the database during a database.)  Hopefully, all of these things will add up to much better experience for both myself and my readers.

I’m also starting to realize the MT is becoming an extremely powerful system.  In some ways, I suspect it’s more than I really need.  I’m just a simple blogger, and I’ve found myself spending more time that I planned tweaking MT to get performance and stability.  In some ways, it’s enough to make me consider going back to Typepad or blogger, where someone else can worry about most of that stuff.  But I like running my own blog software, so I don’t foresee that happening.  Besides, who knows, I might find benefits to the increased power.

(Special thanks to Jon Sullivan for providing the public doman image used in this post.)

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.) 

After many emails with StartLogic, their technical support finally determined that two tables from my blog’s MySQL database up and disappeared. This means that my only option was to restore from a backup. Fortunately, I created a backup back when I was first having problems, but before the errant tables decided to run off together. This means that I was able to restore almost everything.

In fact, the only thing I ended up losing was two blog posts I posted during the window when everything seemed to be okay again. The good news about that is that they are both posts I also put up on Multiply. So I didn’t lose anything.

I apologize for how long it took to resolve the problems. I hope to be back up and running at full capacity soon.

Oh, and as a sidenote, apparently if you need to restore from an old backup of you MT database, you’re better off dropping all the tables from the database first. I skipped that step in my first attempt to do a restore and got nothing but grief as a result.

About once every two weeks, I like to run the index page for my blog through the HTML Validator. I like to try and keep my page as clean and properly coded as possible. (Now some day, I just have to tackle cleaning up my style sheet and feeds.)

For the most part, I get a fairly clean report and it just takes a couple of minutes to clean up any errors the validator does report. Fortunately, the templates I use have already been cleaned up, so any errors I get are actually introduced by my posts. Considering I don’t use much HTML in my posts, I don’t make many mistakes with it. In fact, my most common mistake is posting a link that has an ampersand in the address and forgetting to replace the “&” with “&” in the address.

Then there are those times when I post the results from an online quiz. Today, when I went through the validation process, the results for the “What Color is Your Soul” quiz alone generated eighty errors. And I had to spend several minutes reading through those errors and making the minor updates that would make each little error go away in turn.

Even these errors are relatively minor. They usually involve not adding the terminating slash to a tag that doesn’t have a corresponding closing tag or not enclosing an attribute’s value in quotes. The hard part is reading through the dense burst of code that make up the quiz results and finding the mistakes. And when there’s a few dozen such mistakes, working through each one can be tedious.

I hope there eventually becomes a day when online quiz creators start doublechecking their HTML against the latest specification. It’d save me a bit of time and trouble. Not to mention any other erstwhile quiz takers that like to keep their blog’s HTML clean.