Geez, you would THINK I would learn.

I’m not doing nightly database dumps on my new server. Yeah, I meant to, but…

Anyway, I just bolloxed up my main template while I was working on someone else’s.

Luckily, I have some copies that are a month or so old, and was able to restore quickly, but why the fuck don’t I have one from last night? I’ll tell you why – I’m a fucking moron.

But you knew that.

Anyway, I’m now setting up nightly dumps again, while I check with my sysadmin to see what he’s doing about mySQL dumps. Because I’m reasonably certain he’s not as lame as I am…

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Ok. I think I hacked most of my changes back in. If anything looks really fucked up to you (well, other than the content), let me know. And now I’m makin’ mySQL backups as well…

I just figured out that ecto, my blog editor (and dude if you’re not using ecto, get on it, it rules, at least on the mac) keeps an image cache of all image uploads. So I have this whole directory full of images I’d uploaded in the past.

I’m right now pushing them all up to my server, so the broken image links in old posts are almost all being fixed with no intervention on my part.

Let me know if you find any broken image links anywhere, I’m sure there are a few, but most of ’em are working now.

Once again, ecto saves me. I love ecto.

It’s like moving into a new house that looks exactly like your old house.

So I jumped the gun last night and transferred moronosphere.com to it’s new home. I figured out how easy this was gonna be and just did it.

Things should be a little faster, that’s about all you should notice.

‘Cos I’m moving on up. You’re moving on out.
Movin’ on up. Nothing can stop me.
Moving on up. You’re moving on out.
Time to break free. Nothing can stop me,
Yeah.

Time’s come to find a new home.

What’s this mean?

Well, not much to you, the reader, nor to my friends for whom I host blogs. Other than a short downtime and then some (hopefully) much better performance.

Basically, I’ve been hosting this blog by the generosity and good grace of my friend Seth, for nearly two years. I owe him a great debt, he’s asked for nothing, and given me space and bandwidth and support. He’s helped me recover from a couple crashes, given me full root access, trusted me not to break anything, and let me monkey to my heart’s content with his server.

Thanks, Seth, and thanks, Jen, for suggesting I start up a blog when all I wanted was a place to park a domain I had hanging around.

But all good things, and all that. I’m hosting a few blogs now, and we’re using more bandwidth, and I need backups and some management tools to handle things I’ve been doing by hand. I got an offer I couldn’t refuse from my friends at http://www.athenahosting.net/.

So I’m picking up and moving this weekend. If you have any problems getting to moronosphere.com this week, it should be short-lived, but let me know about it (click my name down there near where it says ‘comments’ and ‘permalink’, or any-damned-thing at moronosphere.com will get to me).

I’ll post an update when I get moved over, and for those of you whose blogs I host, I’ll let you know before I take things down, so carry on blogging until otherwise advised.

…yes, I know the category archives for this site seem to be empty. I’m playing with dynamic indexes to see if I can speed up rebuilds. Not quite working yet, and I’m not sure why.

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-edit-

I couldn’t get that to work. It required some .htaccess surgery, and I couldn’t get it to produce any output.

The idea is that you route the web server request through a php pre-processor and generate the pages on the fly rather than writing out index pages for everything, which is a great idea for pages people don’t hit that often. But something wasn’t right so I’ve tuned back to static publishing.

With Ecto working, I was able to post all the archived stuff from July 17 on; so I lost nothing but posted images. I had it all saved in Ecto’s cache.

So we’re now complete, in effect. Broken image links I’ll try to replace, though I may not get to all of them. But the work is all still here, and (shortly) completely backed up.

The Ecto problem was actually a Movable Type 3.2 bug.

In short, there’s a very minor problem in XMLRPCServer.pm. I looked at the code and the fix seemed to be moving a single line up before some particular is THING installed check in the perl code, which supports my notion that MT was looking for some package or other that my install didn’t have, but also didn’t need. That’s a guess, though.

In any case, I have a patched version of XMLRPCServer.pm installed, and am posting happily with ecto again. Six Apart (Movable Type’s owners) have not announced the fix/patch yet, I would assume because they’re testing it; I expect to see a release shortly.

This was the piece missing in MT 3.2 as far as I’m concerned; this was what stopped me cold with the blogging, because I’m so used to working in Ecto, I can’t blog any other way. With Ecto back, I should be able to update more.

That’s assuming I ever quit getting horribly depressed from reading Ray’s Katrina entries. It’s getting so I’m afraid to read the news…

It’s a whole new moronosphere here, now with extra Piracy.

Let me know if you have any problem with the way this displays. Let me know if you like it.

If you hate it, get on your knees and practice your oral skills.

I started out just porting my old look to new templates, but then when I found Arvind’s Style Generator I got kind of inspired to go three-way.

And then I did something really smart. I asked for help.

The fabulous Doxy went above and beyond the call and did a stylesheet, and some graphics for me, and sat here with me tweaking and adjusting until we got something I think looks pretty damned good. She gets 100% of the credit for what looks good, and I get 100% of the credit for what doesn’t.

Now maybe I can actually get back to blogging.

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If this looks fucked up on your browser, try shift-reload, and if that doesn’t fix it, try blowing away your cache. That should fix it. I’ve checked it on (MacOSX) Safari, Opera, IE, Firefox and Mozilla, and it displays fine on all of them for me.

Ok, I feel better.

I got mySQL database dumps going on our server, as I had before, but I also am automatically copying them to a remote machine nightly. I test this tonight via a cron job but it worked when I launched it manually. So starting tonight I’ll have dailys and we won’t risk loss of more than a day of work.

Obviously I should have done this a couple weeks ago. And I knew that. But at least I can get back to writing about something other than technogeekery.

Hey, MT32 users? How the hell can I turn on comment notifications? It seems obvious but I can’t seem to locate where the knob is for that feature, and MtNotify, the plugin I used to use for notofications, barfs in 3.2. I don’t want to miss a single word my lovely readers say.

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Note – we’re now running on the non-beta version of MT3.2. Weeee!