Blogged

Mena Trott owes me a drink

Upgrading to Movable Type 3.2 had always been part of the most recent blog revision here. The last part, by intention. Yes, I know that 3.2 has been out for three-quarters of a year. So I’m not exactly an early adopter. Sue me.

I think MT is a great product that improves with each iteration. It certainly makes my web publishing experience…well, possible. Also enjoyable, much more so than in the bad old hand-coding days. Upgrading to new editions, however, has always been the very soul of tedium. I put off this latest upgrade as long as I could, but good web citizenship demanded that I finally get to it.

The instructions for moving up to this latest edition are actually user-friendly, evidence of an effort by Six Apart to render the experience less painful. I figured that I could meet them halfway, and so tried to work methodically (yet cheerfully) through the process. And the sailing was smooth: I backed up the database, plugged in my settings, and uploaded the various files (in the appropriate modes, I might add) without a hitch. I stumbled a bit over permissions for a couple of script files, but otherwise it was all good.

The annoyance began when I realized that I’d misunderstood one of the publishing options I’d selected. I thought that the new (to me) entry basename arrangement for blog posts would apply only to posts created after the upgrade. To my dismay, I discovered that all of my posts now had brand-spanking-new URLs, all based on new basenames. Great! Unless, of course, you had ever linked to any post I’d ever written.

So if you tried to follow a link here at any time on Sunday afternoon and got a “can’t find blah blah blah” error message, well, that’s why.

I won’t bore you by recounting the time I wasted running up blind alleys and generally pissing myself off. Suffice it to say that I finally reestablished the old numerical-based filenames in addition to the new swanky entry basenames so that no one would think Waveflux had been booted off the digital island. It just took time that I probably won’t get back. Additionally, my archive index page became suddenly devoid of content and it took me a bit of stumbling around to work up a solution. Actually, more of an alternative than a solution - that index page now displays links to blog entries grouped by week, which is an improvement over the old setup.

(Another thing this upgrade taught me is that I needed to upgrade Firefox to 1.5. Beforehand, I couldn’t save, edit, or delete entries. That was pretty funny.)

I’m not saying that experience this is the fault of Six Apart, because it’s not…though a big ol’ warning sign (Danger! Peligroso!) about the hazards of blithely changing basename conventions would have helped.

I am saying, though, that I’d probably feel better about things if Mena Trott bought me a drink.

Addendum: This post is also a test to see if, well, I can post.

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