Results tagged “Movable Type”

I haven't been writing much since 2006, with nothing to say for several months until quite recently. When I tried to enter some posts and clean up some presentation issues, MT presented some odd behaviour. In fact I was unable to write or edit entries in Opera (which has become my browser of choice) which was probably related to the way Opera handled Java scripts. That seems to have gone away with an Opera upgrade and a reinstall of Java.

When I peeked into the MT sites, I saw that there had been upgrades, including the release of version 5 in January 2010. I began the upgrades a couple of weeks ago. This was a more demanding upgrade. I installed MT 5.01 by a clean install. At that point I got lost on the upgrade path until I remembered - basically learned again - some of the server side file structure. Once I figured out which folder was my Web Root, I got the uploaded files in the right directories and CHMOD-ed and got the mt-configure.cgi file reading right.

MT tried to supersede many plug-ins and to revise the handling of templates - basically allowing for the incorporation of some pieces of the old templates in new widgets or template modules. I refreshed MT templates, lost some of the features in the sidebars on my old templates I have to go back and edit some templates to get some content back on line but it's on track again. On the positive side, this brings a lot of old files up to date and gives me a lot of new options. Assuming that I start to write again.

Back in January, I ran the upgrade to Movable Type 4.1. The developers made a number of moves to make MT more attractive to personal users including changes to let personal users migrate from Word Press and to port Word Press Styles to MT. The management of pictures and content has become easier with the ability to upload and manage "assets" and then use the assets in the blog.

I haven't used it much. I have been busy at work, and spent more my personal time reading and pursuing other things.

I had been thinking about writing for years. By the summer or fall of 2003 I was moving towards starting a Web log but I had been occupied with work and career issues, and a failing marriage. I started A Sea of Flowers at the beginning of April 2004 as I separated from my wife.

I started A Sea of Flowers as a Web log on the Typepad hosting service in April 2004 and moved to my own hosted site, using Movable Type with a MySQL database. I started using Movable Type 3.1D and have stayed with MT.

Many of my early posts are about connecting with my parents and brothers and sisters and friends for support in the early stages of separation. I began to discuss the emotional issues in the marriage and divorce. I wrote several posts about transformational counselling and New Age spirituality, which were important to my ex-wife and central to my distance from her and her family. My comments about these topics reflect my skepticism about those belief systems, my anger at the impact of those belief systems on my life, and my distance from the people who adopt them - a distance that makes me frankly contemptuous.

I started to posted reviews of many of the books I have read. I wrote a few posts about Canadian folk music. In June and early July I wrote several posts about my expectations and involvement in the 2004 Winnipeg Folk Festival. In August I posted reports of my visits to the Canmore and Edmonton Folk Festivals.

Through the spring and summer of 2004, I wrote about my contacts with David, reflecting on his drug abuse and his devotion to the values he has adopted to justify his life, the futility of talking to him about getting out of the gutter, and my efforts to remain open to helping him when he is ready to change his life. I wrote several posts about cycling with my friends and about health and fitness. I wrote about books I had read. I also began to write reviews for Blogcritics.org, a blog owned by Eric Olsen, a writer in Cleveland. I stopped reviewing books on my own blog unless they fit into another interest.

I began to write about society, culture, ideas and politics. I wrote about superstition and emotion, looking at how these aspects of human impulse and thinking are satisfied and validated by culture and religion.

I had a second blog for writing about the early months of separation, and my relationship with my family. I also used that blog as a news service for friends and family. It was private, in a password-protected directory. I called that blog "The Bleak Moor" at first, but I thought that was too moody, and I changed the name to "Rise Again" - another title inspired by a song by Stan Rogers. I lost interest in that kind of writing as my life settled down. I stopped writing in that blog by September, 2004, and I shut it down in May 2005.

For a couple of years, I also kept a few web pages in the root folder of my domain, with some core information about me and my blogs. I wrote them in a text editor and loaded them with an FTP client. When Movable Type introduced page entries with MT 4.0 in August 2007, I dropped that and started to manage that content through MT.

I still administer a site dedicated to Jane Mary McDonald, who was a nun in the Sisters of Holy Cross. She died of cancer in 2003. Her life as a nun, her work with the poor, and her struggle for justice against the Sisters of Holy Cross and the Archdiocese of Winnipeg deserve to be recognized.

Another half a year, another upgrade.

The installation instructions suggest untarring on the server and installing the files on the server.  I know how to install by FTP, and that's what I did. 

MT says it has the best documentation of any blogging software. I suppose it does, given how sparse the documentation on Open Source software can be. They still take things for granted. Thousands of users may know how to untar on in the server, and where to unpack the files, and how to move them to the mt-static and cgi-bin/mt folders.  Thousands must know how to effect a fresh install on the server.  It's still all geek to me.

I have started to use the new features, and started to change several templates and then to apply a new layout and style.  A few hours later, I think it's working decently. The style (at this moment) is called Portland.

I have not been posting regularly since the end of 2005, but I have kept up with Movable Type upgrades. The upgrade to 3.33 or 3.34 involved new features that had previously been implemented by the BigPAPI plugin, and made BigPAPI and plugins that depended on it stop working. I had been using CCode and TCode. I had not installed the new versions of CCode properly. It has to do with adding a script to the head of a template and adding a tag into two or three templates. Registered commenters were getting an error message, as I found out yesterday.

Once I turned off CCode, my junk comment folder began to fill up. That's not a problem - it doesn't get published and I just delete it. It looks like CCode plugin was working and doing its job, which is hiding the blog from spam comment bots. Giving the bots a false return must put a load on my bandwidth, but saves me from having to clean out the junk folder.