the blog quebecois

I'm ba-a-a-a-ck!

That was quite the adventure. The biggest obstacle, as usual, was my own stupidity. When it came time to select the hosting package I opted without thinking for a Microsoft Business account. I have nothing against Microsoft software, mind you; but Movable Type's (MT) documentation, which I perhaps should have glanced at before starting all this, would reveal that it was meant to run on Unix/Linux servers. You can rig it up to run under Windows Server 2003, but there's about two pages' worth of file renaming, configuration and other platform-specific details.

By the time I got all that sorted out, my FTP evaluation program would have expired. So I checked to see if I could revert to a Unix setup -- unfortunately, the host's policy is to allow a package change only once every 30 days.

But the good folks (Seriously -- go buy something from them now. I don't care if you don't have a computer. Nor do they.) at 1&1, when apprised of this circumstance, arranged to switch me back to a Linux package at the earliest opportunity, in five days. (I don't know anything about the mechanics of managing large server farms, but I'm guessing that there are inflexible administrative tasks that must be run on a weekly or monthly basis before individual accounts can be updated.)

The five days I didn't mind so much, as I had a number of other things to take care of.

Installing MT is actually fairly easy once you understand its directory structure and which files have to be modified for read/write permissions.

I must say that it went brilliantly, apart from the fact that I couldn't make it publish anything.

Bruce from Autonomous Source, working on the valid presumption that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, emailed Sunday morning to offer to help me out.

If I didn't know better, I'd have thought he was dissing my 1337 h4x0rz skillz! I fired back:

I'll have you know that I'm an expert at installing Movable Type, Sir. I've done it no less than three times this weekend. It's getting it to run that's a bit of a problem.

What's been happening (and may also be responsible for the error message I posted) is that it isn't properly initializing. The main admin screens are of vers. 3.3., but the templates that load are from my old setup (along with all my previous posts). I think I figured it out last night, and one of the moderators at MT's forum agrees that it's probably what's happening.

It seems that the MySQL database wasn't wiped out when the new account started, and so MT thinks it's performing an upgrade rather than a whole new install.

That's the latest theory, anyway. I'll re-re-re-reinstall it this afternoon, this time taking care to kill the database first and hope that MT hooks up with a new one (hey, I've got 50 of them to spare, so one of them's bound to work).

If later on this evening you hear a loud noise, worry not -- it'll just be me, shooting my computer.

So here we are. It'll take me a few days to figure out all the gears and widgets, but I should be back to my blazing blogging pace soon.