Blogged

The seven stages of upgrading

Easier to install than blogging software

Repeat visitors to this little weblog should note that Waveflux is indeed behaving much as you’d expect from a fully-functioning blog. Individual entries appear in full; archive lists are accessible and display the posts they should, and only the posts they should. Commenting…well, I’ll get back to you on that, but I expect readers to soon be able to weigh in on whatever strikes their fancy seems to be restored.

In short: all, or most, seems well. This was definitely not the case as recently as yesterday morning, and hadn’t been the case for the better part of a week. This site’s upgrade to Six Apart’s new and widely publicized 4.x version of Movable Type was not exactly the smooth experience I had hoped for - not remotely close, really. Hope soon gave way to less appealing states: confusion, frustration, anger, guilt, and then (in the words of Rachel Lucas) being not mad, just…disappointed.

Think of the process as the Seven Stages of Upgrading™. I know I’ve touched on only six. We’ll get to the seventh.

Prior to the upgrade, I’d been using dynamic publishing for archive files. This will mean nothing to many readers, which is fine. The goal of publishing dynamically - having pages served up on the fly rather than as static files sitting on my server - was speed and efficiency on my end as the user. Rebuilding pages under the static publishing arrangement, which I would have had to do whenever I made a change to the underpinnings of the site, took forever (that is, as long as ten minutes twenty minutes, which is a long time in the personal publishing biz). For reasons not understood by me, the head honcho at my web host, LivingDot, or the support staff at Six Apart, the upgrade rendered dynamic publishing impossible. Various combinations of publishing settings left the blog without visible entries or archive lists and broken incoming links.

My host tried to diagnose the problem without success. 6A support tried and…well, I don’t know precisely what 6A support found because I never heard back from them. From what I was told, 6A wasn’t very helpful to LivingDot in solving the mess.

As the hapless blogger, I was pretty much left to stumble through the various psychological stages of upgrading as the process and the kludged (a technical term) state of the blog dragged on for days. In limbo, I considered my own culpability. Had I somehow kludged the inner working of the blog myself without knowing? More likely, had I set myself up for disappointment by insisting that the weblog work the way I wanted it to, the way it had before?

Ultimately, LivingDot could offer only two paths: static publishing with file extension set to .php (which would preserve the validity of all those incoming links floating about in the aether) or a slate-cleaned fresh install of MT4. After days of things not working, I lacked the faith to commit to the latter option - I may have felt that any attempt at a re-install would result in the blog catching fire - and so chose static publishing. The result is the working weblog you see before you. Sluggish as a Missouri mule (a creature I’ve never seen, though I live in Missouri) on my end, but functional on your end. And when you get down to it, it’s all about you, isn’t it, friend?

Well, mostly about you, perhaps.

Grounds for indignation seem here, at first glance, fertile. I paid LivingDot expressly for the service of upgrading the blog - taking my clumsy self out of the equation - and wound up not being able to use a feature I’d found valuable. I paid Six Apart expressly for its legendary support in hopes of solving the matter, and got no material assistance in return. The problem with indignation, of course, is that it requires a pure medium in which to thrive. It’s hard to fault the effort that LivingDot put into trying to solve the publishing issue, especially as it was the managing director who was putting in the hours. Here’s the thing: this episode aside, my relationship with LivingDot has been pretty good, better than I’ve experienced with any previous web host. They’ve been consistently helpful to my checkered career as a blogger. It’s difficult for righteous irritation to take root in that kind of soil.

It’s somewhat easier to remain irritated with Six Apart, who seemed to check into the situation and check right back out again, and on my dime. In fairness, I must admit that I brought 6A into this affair on a Friday - not late, mind you, but still on a Friday - and 6A support states quite clearly that its working hours don’t include weekends. Here, too, I must recall that support there has previously been quite helpful to me.

It’s a poignant situation: You’d prefer to be really fucking furious, but lack the grounds to sustain it. Goddamn my rational nature.

Yes, we are talking now about the seventh stage of upgrading. Acceptance isn’t the term, exactly. More like provisional resignation, perhaps, and this informs the provision: Movable Type, a personal publishing technology in which I’ve invested a fair chunk of self and time, has gone from being merely tedious to install to downright hostile in its difficulty. Anticipating this, I took steps to make the situation smoother and watched in dismay as the process became rockier than I had imagined.

I do have plans for the weblog that involve not only a continued use of Movable Type, but a deeper exploration of its capabilities. Even after the events of the past few days, this prospect excites me. There’s a wariness at work, however, and a determination to not go through this again - even if it means I have to change platforms.

No matter how pretty Mena Trott is.

And now, back to the regularly scheduled weblog.

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