After pointing Buck Daruma to ways to do blogrolls, I decided to test-drive MTBlogroll.

This is a MovableType plugin by Arvind Satyanarayanthat will manage a blogroll locally in your MovableType mySQL database, instead of keeping it on someone else’s web site like BlogRolling.

The advantage is clear; faster, since it’s local, and you don’t depend on an external site to be up. It also have a number of features I like, one of which is that it can import my existing blogrolls. And of course, i have much more control over it.

It was easy to install and easy to configure, though the docs are minimalist at best and the template changes caused me some confusion.

There are a few downsides though — the main one being that it evidently can’t do ‘recently updated’. Now, for a roll of static links, that’s fine. Particularly for things like non-blog links. I don’t care when they’re updated. But for things like my Daily Reads list, I depend on that (so it’s annoying when blogs don’t ping the right sites to make this work).

In short I’d say that this works really well aside from that feature; I’ll be switching my Daily Reads back to blogrolling, but I may put my static non-blog links into my local roll since I don’t often update that.

For sites I host, it’s up and ready and working, all you need is a template hack and to load in your blogroll; mail me and I’ll show you how or do it for you.

That monkey on my back
The monkey on my back, back, back
Gonna change my ways tonight
Nobody’s fault but mine

I will get that gun tonight
No-no-no-no-nobody’s fault but mine

     –Led Zeppelin, ‘Nobody’s Fault But Mine’

You may remember the recent utter collapse of livejournal. Well now, Diaryland has taken a similar crap:

8:51 pm: UGH. Diaryland has been down for several hours. Two out of three drives in the RAID array on the main web server died for some reason, so we have had to put up a new server and copy the site over there. No entries are lost, we have backups of those and the database servers are fine. The main problem is just that we now have to regenerate all the diaries from backups on the new server, which unfortunately will take a long time, overnight at least, because there are so, so many. The order they are regenerated will be all the gold diaries first, and then by the time the diary was last updated.

I can’t believe this has happened on the new server after the exact same thing happened 2 months ago on the old server and we moved the site to this one, it’s absolutely unreal. This whole day has been a total nightmare for me, it’s so stressful and depressing to have to go through this whole ordeal all over again.

– andrew @ diaryland

This is why I self-host. When my server goes out, I have only myself to blame. When I corrupt a database, as I did a couple weeks back, I get to go hack around and fix it. Nobody’s Fault but Mine.

Speaking of self-hosting, check out Doxy’s new home-away-from-home, Phone Slut Blog. She’s still maintaining her old Phone Slut Diary but this new one should see more frequent updates. As with everything Doxy does, this is well worth a read.

And now I’m off to see a my friend Tricia to talk about a most painful tattoo. But later when I complain, remind me — Nobody’s Fault but Mine.