Hello, my name is Jhames

My job is to make pretty things.

Hearsay: Why, that’s just crazy talk.

I’m not dead, sweetie

August 29th, 2008

…I’m just another victim of upgrading MovableType with errors galore. Let me add to yet the rest of the Google searches for Movable Type installation errors with this entry.

Before you run any upgrade for Movable Type, always, always back-up your entries. I had this intense fear that I lost all my entries dating back to 2002 because I didn’t think to back-up my blog before updating MT. I thought about laughing it all off and starting fresh, but I am not that kind of man. I freaked the fuck out and kept myself unnecessarily up for nights at a time trying to remedy the errors.

DixieSys is my server host, only now it’s owned by 415 whatever. The point is, my problems began when my site was transferred to a new server. If your site succumbs to such a fate, your MT configuration will be hosed. And trying to re-configure your MT system will be hell.

use strict;
BEGIN { $ENV{‘MT_HOME’} = ‘/home/james/domains/jhames.com/public_html/cgi-bin/mt’; }

See that lovely bit of code? I had to enter that into every CGI file because of the new server configuration. If you have to do the same, you can get your current working directory by running ‘mt-check.cgi’. Oh, and if you think you are going to find that solution in any documentation produced by MovableType, think again.

Now that I have my site up and running again, I am going to look into WordPress and its ability to manage multiple blogs. And if the shit works, then it’s goodbye MT and hello WP.

Posted in technology

  • http://patricia-elizabeth.com Lunanina

    By the time Six Apart came out with their license program, I had my version of MT so hacked that upgrades were a bitch and a half. I was always worried that I’d lose everything.

    I switched to Expression Engine and I’ve never regretted it. Out of the box it did practically everything I had to hack MT to do and updates are a breeze. Plus the forums are great and the folks are helpful.

  • http://www.anildash.com/ Anil Dash

    Hi Jhames, I work with the team at Six Apart that makes Movable Type, and I wanted to apologize first for the frustration you had upgrading MT. I also wanted to take a minute to ask what we could have documented better for you, and whether there’s any information we can take to your web hosts to make it easier to run and/or upgrade MT in their environment.

    Most of our users have found recent upgrades to be much *easier* than in the past, so if you’re not having that experience, I’d love to help out. Let me know what we can do to assist.