After several days of mucking about with alternative blogging solutions, I’m… blogging again. Here’s the summary, more for the sake of record keeping than interest:
Movable Type part I
This blog has been running on Movable Type since I started, and it’s needed surprisingly little maintenance throughout for more than a decade. Updates are a bit of a pain, and commenting hasn’t always worked, but for the most part it’s (a.) worked, and (b.) looked fairly consistently like shit.
However, the server was eventually running MT4.something, which has been end-of-life for some time. The looming horror of a major migration coincided with a period when the Movable Type 5 upgrade only made sense if you could read Japanese, thanks to the somewhat unfathomable story of its parent company. The open-source MT4 continuation project Melody, meanwhile, looked promising for a time… until it crashed and burned. All of which probably factored into my losing interest in blogging for a while.
So: hello, 2013. I miss blogging. What shall I do with this site?
The obvious answers:
- Take a data dump, check its integrity on a local server, then update that local server to the latest MT5 and have a play. Or–
-
After 12 years, succumb to the masses, port the whole thing over to WordPress, and be done with it.
MT5 local hosting on OS X
Web Sharing was slightly broken by Mountain Lion, which would have been annoying except that my Mac Pro hasn’t had a clean install in the four-or-so years since I bought it. It hasn’t needed it, but it has got a little crufty around the edges, so many of the problems are probably my fault. There are bits of MacPorts and Homebrew and I think something else kicking around, a bunch of stuff compiled from source – it’s a mess in there.
I do have Apache up, MySQL is up, and cpan did sane things with all the Perl modules. APXS was easy to fix, but I ran into this compiler issue, and unfortunately don’t understand how to implement the fix. So I’m stuck with plain old cgi, not even mod_fcgid let alone mod_perl. Ugh.
Good enough for testing, though… and good enough to discover that Movable Type fails to restore backups from quernstone.com. Ah. That’s a problem. UTF8 errors, apparently.
So while I have a working MT5 install locally, I don’t have a feel for how old blogs get pulled across into the new Site containers, nor how the (considerably different) MT5 feels with lots of posts.
I also don’t have backups which I know to be good. Which is always a worry.
This is pretty much where this blog petered out for 18 months, and where this blog post will leave you in suspense.
To. Be. Continued.