Yes, Otto, I KNOW: Switch to WordPress. Well, if using MySQL were easier…

I just upgraded to MT 3.2, and as you can probably tell, I’ve f’d up my site. Well, this is nothing. At first the upgrade locked me out of the site. Then, when I finally got MT working, I discovered it had blown away 99% of my comments, so I had to delete the entire weblog—Three times I had to delete it, because MT kept timing out—then reimport all the entries.

And now I have to fix the template. Well, I was getting kinda tired of the old one, but damn: don’t want to start futzing with a new one. Jeez.

Life is too short to have blood pressure this high.

I don’t post for a week and suddenly it can’t be bothered with putting my last entry on the front page?

Urg. Must. Change. Blogging. Software.

When I add over 20 blogs to a particular blogroll—Food, in case you’re wondering—in a little over a day, I guess I’m telling myself I’m getting a little interested in a topic.

Who knows, maybe the Crazy Devotion to the Altar of Cooking thing may be happening. I’ve started reading cookbooks for the fun of it. Pretty much anything is possible.

Well, I’m already certifiable these days, for both personal and political reasons. This nonsense with Movable Type and Blacklist is enough to send me over the edge.

(No, Otto, I can’t switch to WordPress; we don’t have MySQL. I guess I could ask Darin and Mitch to install that, but considering they already spent one day of their weekend doing all this, I don’t think they’re gonna.)

Blacklist isn’t working: I’m still getting comment spam that I have to delete manually. I tried to test-comment an entry earlier than 14 days old, simply got an error. Four of my most popular entries (Blue Moon ice cream, Blue Moon ice cream: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut, children’s names, and Lazytown) are more than 14 days old.

So, great: I’m already hating this site because even thought MT3.x makes it easier to deal with comment spam, you still have to deal with it. I was hoping Blacklist could solve my problems, but it’s not working.

If one day you just get a 404 in this space, you’ll know why.

And more: My templates are all messed up. Must be something in the Weblog Config; can’t figure out what. Darin has already asked what I can go do for the day to get me out of here.

After many months of saying we were going to do it (and never doing it, much to Andy Hertzfeld’s dismay), Mitch and Darin finally got cracking this weekend on completing the move from the server still at Andy’s house to the server at Chez Nous.

Guess what the big holdup’s been? Yes, yes: this very site.

Anyhow—so in order to prepare for the final bit of moving, I have turned off comments, I’m going to export the site, and I’m going to go finish making dinner.

Best part of moving to the new server: availability of the Perl Storable module! Anyone running MT 3.0 knows why that’s exciting.

Update: Well, phew. Apparently it’s done. The DNS has been changed. All things are in new positions, and yet look the same! Homina homina homina, I get to use Blacklist again! Woot! We have Spam Assassin! It’s like the Web is usable again!

Update 2: But wait! Something is wrong! Blacklist is interfering with posting comments, let alone stopping spam! Can the SuperAdlers fix it? And, more importantly, can they fix it before the kids go nuts because we promised them a trip to the ice cream store?

Yes, this site was down for a couple of days. I don’t know why (Darin does, but he’s off “making a living” or something, so he can’t comment). True, my site wasn’t available to you…but it wasn’t available to spammers either! Always a silver lining!

Of course, now they’re back too. Sigh.