Initial (geeky) thoughts on Movable Type beta 4.0, release 4

Sorry for the aside, folks, it's about to get geeky up in here. Come back tomorrow if you just want to hear about the food.

I was having a really lovely Saturday afternoon yesterday, so I decided to try and upload Movable Type 4.0, release candidate 4. I've been wanting to solve the spam problem I've had for months. Big mistake. 12 hours later, at 3:30 in the morning, thank goodness I had the sense to reboot my database. Complete disaster.

Much of the problem was my human error, I'm sure. I felt sympathy for the befuddled generation who couldn't figure out how to program a VCR. There are whipper snappers out there who could out-upload me in a second, I'm sure. True, the migration from Typepad to Movable Type was accomplished only with much hand-holding by my buddy Adam. But whatevs, I've been running this website for over three years now, surely I could handle a simple upgrade! But no, I got smacked down by the technology.

To anyone who's curious, MT 4.0 Release 4 beta LOOKS like a fine tool.

*The interface is a little blocky and cold, which I don't mind. <

*Comment clean-up seems much faster -- you can choose to display 100 comments at a time. There is apparently a CAPTCHA to reduce spam, which I couldn't find in my republishings of the site.

*I liked the rich text editor, which I would much prefer to the hand-coding labor I do on my current iteration of MT 3.2.

*MT 4.0 beta's rc from 6/27/07 seemed to upload to my server in a snap but was a little buggy, so I upgraded to rc4 and my site crashed.

*I liked the added option of allowing tags, keyword editing, excerpts because I like the science of SEO. I wouldn't necessarily use them, but I like that they're an option.

And really, I read the documentation (well, I read it after I crashed my website), but in one part, it says to upload the MT folder into a cgi-bin folder, and in another, it says it should live on the root. And I would recommend a fresh start upload instead of an overwrite because otherwise, you'll have to go through and clean out all your plug-ins, which may prevent your database from getting configured. You'll have to re-upload all your plug-ins, but I don't actually use very many so it's not a problem with me. (Also, I think Blogroll doesn't work in MT 4 yet.)

I'm just going to wait til the bugs are fixed and the release is stable and approved by many before I shepherd everything over. The release candidate from June 27 didn't crash the site, but the current release candidate did. For the curious: I think it's the templates. I'd have to rebuild all my templates from scratch because MT 4.0 has a new system of templating which you have to use in order to publish anything. I've realized that I built my website in this hodge podge coat of many colors way (Dolly's coat, not Joseph's coat). So a migration to the new system means building the site from the bottom up. The code and tags would be much cleaner, but it's hard to commit to that kind of work.

I also learned that I have lost many of your comments to the spam filter. If you've ever written a comment and it didn't get posted, it's not because I didn't like your comment. It's because I'm having this horrible spam problem and your comment got shifted into the manure pile of tramadol prescriptions, cheap airfare and enthusiastic ladies who think I have a "Very good site!! :-)" The commenter trusting option has never worked on my MT, and the 18,000 spam comments I have effectively bury the real comments.

Anyway, an upgrade TK. Whether I move to Wordpress or MT 4. I guess it's time to redesign, too. If any of you have any advice for this old broad, I'm all ears.

(If you were my therapist, or my friend Julie, you might say, Ganda, you quit your freelance assignments in order to free up some time for a social life. And yet, here you are, shackled to your computer. You didn't go out last night because you were migrating folders back and forth on the FTP. Don't you think it's time you left good enough alone and went out and dated once in a while? To which I might reply by mumbling something under my breath about having to clear out my spam box while staring at my shoes.)