Insert an unhappy expression here. Between my hosting company and my blogging engine, my entire Blog went belly up about 10 hours ago. It’s back on its feet now and I think everything works. I know that I lost a couple of comments, but nothing too recent and nothing that matter, I don’t think. The question now is what to do about MT.
MT is a PeRL based system. Trying to run that on a Windows server was my own pipe dream but it’s worked pretty well over the years. The problem with MT is that its Berkley file-based DB system is either happy or unhappy. And when it’s unhappy – as mine got to be this weekend – it simply stops working. And yes, there are a few utilities but they’re all Linux based and that just pisses me off further.
What happened was I went to post a new entry to the system. The system took it without comment. I then posted another entry and it yonked on me. I looked at the server-based status page and that’s when I was told that I was out of HD space on the server. Mine you I have about 80MB worth of files and a 250MB allowance so I said “Huh?”
Enter the ISP. They store the web server log files as part of the storage allowance. And they kept up to three months worth. 1 + 1 = Boom.
MT was left in a state where it had four entries pointing to one and once that one got deleted the other three entries became ghosts and won’t go away. At this point I said “gimmie my export” so I got my blogs, comments, and pings and got out of dodge. The next question was how to get it back. A clean install of MT would have been ideal, but I couldn’t find a version of 2.65. The only version I had of 2.65 was my test server here at home – I had to rebuild a new blog there and copy the individual DB files by hand.
So. MT has pissed me off. Greatly. So much so that I’m now considering dasBlog. I’ve also been contemplating a re-write of SharpMT, seeing as I want it to use the new beta bits of Visual Studio 2005… if I go dasBlog, so does SharpMT. Erm, dasSharp, as the case may be. It’ll depend on what happens with MT. It should have rebuilt all its pages bu the time I’m do with this entry, but I’ve got to do something about this because I shouldn’t have to reload my Blog engine three times in two years… that’s just not good times.
Bah! And screw PeRL too, just because it’s there.
Switch to WordPress! You will thank me later.
http://wordpress.org
Actually, that’s one of the comments I lost: PHP and MySQL are required. Ewwy. I refuse to learn yet another markup language, just on principle and MySQL would cost me extra cash with the ISP here – that’s why it’s not installed for MT. Besides, both of those, PSP and MySQL are not “windows friendly”: they run on Win32 but they are that generic type of thing that MT with PeRL and Berkley have been…
dasBlog on the other hand is ASP.NET based, C#-based source code, and XML-based storage for the blogs… the biggest drawback there is the same as there is for any new engine: New templates, broken permalinks, and a new setup scheme. Not to mention anything I move to requires a re-write of SharpMT… it’s just ugly all around.
At least I got a working version of MT back up and running… bastards, still, the lot of them!
I’m considering either upgrading to MT3.0 (not overly fond of the whole fee system there) or just switching to something like WordPress but I just can’t imagine blogging without #MT.
Does #MT handle 3.0 and/or other blogging APIs other that the MT API?
Actually, I did post to WordPress using #MT, but I have not had a chance to fully test it out and see what happens. But it does work…
As far as I know, #MT only works well with MT. dasBlog changed just enough things to make it not work. Can’t speak for WordPress. I’ve heard that it works OK with MT 3.0. They lost me for 3.0 b/c there’s no way I’m paying (any more than I do now) for blogging. If I was that keen on it, I would have stuck with CityDesk and blogged offline.
The problem with the API that all of the engines use say that it’s the Bloggar API. That’s a 1/2 truth. They all take the API and add their own commands to it, which usually means that to support more than one engine you offer the Lowest Common API or you focus on one engine at a time. Which is how #MT got started in the first place.
Bah. It all sucks. Sucks! Sucks! Sucks! Sucks! Sucks! Sucks!
Actually, while WordPress seems nice, as far as I can tell, it hasn’t progressed to the point yet of being able to handle plugins such as my smilies macro, etc. Perhaps it can, I dunno; I’m sure it will once the userbase grows, but for now I’ll just stick with MT 2.66 or whatever the heck I have installed and leave it at that until WP matures.
WP has matured quite nicely. I used to use b2 before WordPress came to life and that was still a nice app. But there are quite a few plugins that make WP feel a bit more like MT in terms of smilies. Check out http://www.alexking.org and he has a full install of WP 1.2 with all his plugins installed. I haven’t checked it out myself, but it seems quite nice.