No Sooner Said Than Done

Well, the fine folks at ICDSoft who host DMfM, have gone above and beyond the call of duty once more, and not only solved the mystery of the disappearing database, but also fixed the broken MovableType install for me.

I meant what I said yesterday about redesigning the site, and moving on from a MovableType-based system. MT is OK, but seems to require a lot of technical faffing, just to upgrade it. :-\

In case you missed the emergency message, created by hand in Dreamweaver, because MT was fooked, here it is:

Dial M for Mangled

In case you were wondering why I've not been writing for some time, I'll tell you. It's not that I don't want to write any more. In fact blogging it seems, has had a bit of a resurgence in popularity of late. No, it's not me that gave up, but the technology. As I write this, I'm doing so via Dreamweaver, in an old skool attempt to at least let you guys know WTF is occurring.

For the past five years, DMfM has been held together by MovableType. It's not the most user-friendly product to install, but considering myself to be reasonably technical, I managed to install it on my server, and have upgraded it successfully in the past as well. Then the comment spam started. So I upgraded to v3.0, however, this killed the whole comment facility completely. Then last month, my hosting company asked me to upgrade the MySQL database that powers the whole thing, to v5.0. I did the upgrade process and all seemed well, at first.

MovableType needed reconfiguring to cope with MySQL5. I dutifully did the reconfig, as per instructions, but guess what? Yes it shagged the MT install. Deep joy. It was late so I went to bed.

I've now decided to scrap MovableType, and start using WordPress to produce my blog. As part of the recovery process I decided to back the database up, prior to removing MovableType and installing WordPress. Of course to achieve this backup the one thing you really need, is a database to back up. Right now, it seems as though the MySQL upgrade has "lost" my database. Five years of blog entries, gone.

I'm currently in talks with my hosting company (the excellent ICDSoft) who have been doing their best Michael Winner impression ("Calm down dear!"), and assuring me that they can see the database (fully converted to MySQL v5) just fine. At some point soon, I daresay they'll let me in on where they've hidden it.

So, as far as you guys are concerned, hang tight, DMfM will return, with a new look, new writing AND comment facility (much requested in reader emails), in the near future.

So there we go. I think a further assessment of blogging systems is in order, before (knowing me) I go with my original gut-instinct, and ditch MT for WP.

Posted by Max at February 11, 2007 12:35 PM