Longklaw.com

Since most other Movable Type upgrades have gone pretty smoothly, I was hoping this one would be the same. Well, it was kind of a pain. The first part of the problem was my fault. I didn’t read the documentation closely enough. MT4 isn’t compatible with the old database I was using. Oops! My bad! I had to convert to a MySQL database.

Once I got the DB converted and started the update, it stopped on the screen that says upgrading the database or starting upgrade or something like that. I also got a JavaScript error that said TC was undefined. It turns out that a lot of the files in the mt-static directory didn’t get copied when I FTPed them. Once I got all the files uploaded, the upgrade went by quickly.

I’m looking forward to playing around with the new features. It looks like it’s going to be cool. This month will be 3 years since I made my first entry, so I think I may make some (minor) changes to the design of the site. Web design isn’t my specialty, so don’t expect much.

Lately I had noticed that it took a really long time to create new entries. Last week I started getting that 500 Internal Server Error whenever I tried to add a new entry or rebuild pages. The error logs said something like “premature end of script headers”. Working with the tech support guys at the hosting company wasn’t much help. If you noticed a lot of “test” entries over the weekend, that was us trying to figure something out. I use the free version of Movable Type, so I don’t think I could’ve gotten any help from them. In the end I figured that it may have something to do with how long it was taking for the script to execute.

A couple of days ago I discovered that Movable Type 3.34 would be released any day now. The release notes promised a performance increase of up to 15 times faster. I installed it today. I tried rebuilding the site and the process is sooo much faster than what is was before. So far I’m not getting any errors. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Yesterday I installed the latest version of Movable Type. So far, so good.

There are a bunch of new features that I have just glossed over for now. The thing that I’m most excited about is the inclusion of tags. Tags are showing up everywhere, so why not here? If you click on one of the tags, you’ll get a weird looking page. I just need to restore my search template from a backup. Better to just hold off on clicking tags for now 🙂 .

Here goes.

I found out about this on Slashdot or Metafilter I think. The picture below shows what longklaw.com looks like as a graph. The graph was created using an application located at http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph. I’m not sure it gives any useful information, but it looks interesting at least.

The following description of what the colors mean was taken from the website used to create the graph:
blue: for links (the A tag)
red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags)
green: for the DIV tag
violet: for images (the IMG tag)
yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags)
orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQUOTE tags)
black: the HTML tag, the root node
gray: all other tags

That whole Coppermine thing wasn’t working out too well, so we had to part ways. I’m trying another option provided by my hosting service. If this doesn’t work, I’ll go back to what I was doing before I tried Coppermine.

The pictures are all there, I’ll have to go back later and add titles, descriptions, etc. You can check it out here.

I am enjoying my time in Azeroth. Somehow, it’s better than Starkville. I like the paladin and druid equally at this point. My only problem is that sometimes I have trouble getting into the game. From what I’ve heard, that is a common problem.

I signed up for a one week free trial of DDO. I just have to download it. Unless it takes an incredibly long time to download, I’ll be playing it sometime this weekend.

It looks like Xfire is being bought by Viacom. I remember when I first heard about it on TechTV, back when it was still TechTV. It couldn’t have been too long after Xfire first started up. If only I could remember to run Xfire every time I play a game. If anybody uses Xfire, my screen name is longklaw.

I decided to try Internet Explorer Beta 7 for a little while. I know it sounds risky, but I wanted to try it. I’m ok with IE’s new look. It reminds me a lot of Netscape 8 for some reason. I’m really glad that it has tabbed browsing. That feature is the only one I wish IE6 had. Of all the web sites I went to, there was only one that looked weird when I viewed it using IE7. After using it for a little while I decided it was time to uninstall IE7 and course IE6 froze up every time I tried to use it. Thank goodness for system restore.

Final Fantasy VII – Advent Children finally came out on DVD yesterday. I went to Sam Goody and picked up a copy. I’ll probably be watching it in the next few days. The manager at Sam Goody told me that I had been shopping there as long as he had been manager there, which is a long time. He said that I was one of those customers he expects to see there at least once a week. Though that used to be true and I have started back shopping there recently, I don’t go to Sam Goody nearly as much now that we have a GameStop here in Starkville. Still, it was nice to know that he appreciated my bu$ine$$.

The spambots have found me in my new home. [sarcasm]I am so thrilled about that.[/sarcasm]

Another relaxing afternoon. I’ve spent a little time working with Google SiteMaps, so hopefully Google will be able to crawl the site more easily.

I’ve been watching the first season of Six Feet Under. It’s morbid, but fascinating.

WoW is just as fun as I remember it. Maybe I can get in an extended session within the next few days.

Check out the new Coppermine-powered photo gallery. It even has some pictures that weren’t on the site before the move.

longklaw.com had to move. Let’s hope this new home works out better than the last.

People that use Movable Type know the importance of the file mt.cgi. You can’t really manage your blog without it. After I made that last post I decided to delete a bunch of junk comments. Apparently mt.cgi was using up a lot of resources so my hosting company changed the permissions on that file to 000. I contacted them and they told me that they couldn’t allow me to execute that file again. I checked and discovered that mt-comments.cgi was also set to 000. I guess that’s one reason I haven’t gotten any comments lately. I have no idea how long that had been the case.

I decided to take my business elsewhere. I had several little annoyances over the year and a half that I’d been with them, but I ignored them because the hosting was cheap. At least they created a tarball with those two files so that I could retrieve them.

Now I’m in my new home. I’ve heard that this company is very friendly to Movable Type. I thought about going with a new system like Geeklog, but I decided to stick with what I know for now. Everything should be about the way it was except that all the links at the top probably don’t work yet. I hope to fix all of that over the next few days. If you notice anything else, please leave a comment here.

I copied an idea from Yeraze and added Google AdSense to the site. Hopefully, he won’t get mad. Actually, I applied for AdSense back in June 2005, but never went through the trouble of adding the code to this site. I even ignored the email from Google wondering why I hadn’t done anything yet. I figured I would just go ahead and give it a try and see what happens. Maybe I can earn back some of the cost of hosting this site.

I changed the Moblog section. I like the new options that Textamerica has made available for that. I’m sure I’ll be rearranging the sidebars soon.