I know it’s not exciting, but I’m just about through migrating this blog to a new hosting provider. I’ve been experimenting with Amazon Web Services, with my blog as always providing an excellent opportunity to gain experience with these web technologies. I’m also using this as an opportunity to adopt a new theme that will hopefully jazz up the site a little bit more as well.
A plane in Brazil was able to capture photos of one of Brazil’s uncontacted indigenous tribes. It is hard to fathom what their experience must be relative to life in “modern society”.
Finally! On top of making WordPress work in under an hour (take that, Movable Type!), I’ve also got a Photo Gallery working too! Sure, it needed a few minor script fixes, but it only took about an hour to figure that out compared to four weeks of failure with Movable Type. I’ll post an update soon once I finish updating all my recent photos.
And so ends the Movable Type experience. I’ll be trying another platform, now at http://www.cdymek.com/blog/. The RSS feed has change as well.
So far, the new new site is up and running. Hopefully it will stay that way. There may be a few “flukes” in the system right now, like permissions errors, but overall it’s just as good as Movable Type with, I hope, more stability.
After all the difficulty of the past week, it would be interesting to find that Six Apart’s Blog It works better with WordPress than Movable Type.
The site has been slammed for a few days now with a heavy enough load trying to access the comments and trackback components to bring down the entire shared server. As a result I’ve taken some countermeasures to try to stop the deluge until more permanent solutions can be found. For the time being, comments and trackbacks have been disabled. Hopefully this will help alleviate enough of the burden on the server that I can keep the site up enough to post.
For some reason Six Apart’s Blog It Facebook application is generating multiple entries to the website when posting from work.
In other news I’m looking in to options for creating a Photo Gallery within Movable Type, in order to bring all my photos online.
Having upgraded to use Movable Type on my personal website, I now get to take advantage of these new integrated services like the Facebook “Blog It” application. We’ll see how well this works.
All the old website content going back to 2003 has been imported now, along with all the comments. The only downside to adding in about 885 entries is that a full site publish takes about 15 – 20 minutes.
On a related note, Movable Type really needs to update their import documentation. The import format is FAR more strict than the examples make it appear. For instance, the BODY: key cannot containing any trailing spaces. Same thing with the COMMENT: key. These two issues forced me to have to reload the entries several times before all the data would load completely.
Still, with that out of the way, I’m free to get back to blogging.
P.S. What’s the point of a Backup and Restore functionality that doesn’t actually have the ability to Restore?
I’ll be trying to extract and load all my old entries in to the new system later tonight, so there may be some strange behavior on the site during that time. Stay tuned for more.