“Ah, my droogs… Appy-polly-loggies. I had something of a pain in my gulliver so I had to sleep. I was not awakened when I gave orders for awakening.”
I think it’s time to change blog engines… No more MovableType? Sort of. SharpMT fans will be happy to know that I’m planning on moving over to TypePad. From my point of view, it’s a ready made MT installation that works without me having to worry about it. The downside is that there will be outages for a little while…
Why the outages? What can break? Oi. Whole bunch of stuff, actually. First on my mind is the search function. Instead of using a native MT search, it’s going to point to Google. Oh, don’t worry: it will only search the site, but that’s another potential problem… all of my permalinks will change. That means that it will take some time for Google to catch up with the changes.
And since the permalinks are changing, I have to figure out what to do with cross-linking articles… depending on how many there are will tell me if I’m going to redirect them directly or just point them to a search page… sorta sucks, but sorta outta my control too. I’ll figure out what to do when I realize how many there are. And the 404 page will not be custom for a while: it’s a feature that I’ve requested from Six Apart, but it’s not available yet.
Also there’s a shift from ASP to HTML. Those neat NEW and LATEST labels on posts and comments? Gone. Sorry! Can’t be helped. The links for downloads should still be the same, but that’s up in the air too. The update page that SharpMT uses to look for updates should still be working OK. The URL is moving with us too, so hurray for that. Alerts will still be fired but the images might be offline for a little while.
Comments will still be active, with better spam protection I’m hoping. Trackbacks too, although no one uses them or cares about them, it seems! Because of all of this, my new posts will be a little light. I plan to switch this soon – depends on how my weekend goes. And since SharpMT works with TypePad, it will continue to evolve… at least I think so.
Guess this will be version 3 of the blog, and yet the layout hasn’t change from the beginning, although this incarnation will over longer “category” pages, which is neat.
Good thing I’m not a web designer by trade – I’m too damned boring when it comes to this things!
Interesting. I just switched to TypePad yesterday after another session of hosing my MT install while attempting an upgrade. It’s just not worth the hassle any longer. So far the transfer has been smooth, though I still have broken links to fix, etc.
I had difficulty using SharpMT to post to TypePad, so hopefully once you get moved to TypePad the bugs will disappear faster. :)
Actually, what kinda problems? I posted OK to TypePad… categories were ok, the links came back, and even image upload worked… “Edit in Browser” doesn’t work, since the links are different, but Edit ‘in place’ seemed to be OK…
Sharp MT is the best tool for Typepad, but there have been two persistent problems:
1. I get an error when I start Sharp MT — “unhandled exception…index was outside the bounds of the array.” I click continue and its fine.
2. I get the same message when I try to edit any existing post using the blog links. I click continue, and the blog link does not open. But if I then try to open the same link again, it opens without an error.
I believe this has something to do with a small difference in the way date/time is coded between MT and typepad. Something to do with time zone.
Most of the other editors for MT, like Zempt and w.bloggar choke completely on editing existing posts. The RSS readers with built-in blogging tools can edit but they all seem to mess up the line breaks.
Even with the two errors, Sharp MT is the best tool for typepad. It’s also the only one with a tabbed interface. I’m sure I’m like a lot of bloggers — I always have more than one post open for editing at a time, and that’s a key feature. So is — believe it or not — the ability to easily insert a link to a previous blog post, or an IE favorite. (Although you might update that to insert a Firefox bookmark just as easily.)
But it’s hard to recommend it to people if you have to say, “you’ll get some error messages but ignore them.”
It’s great that you’re using typepad; hopefully you can iron out these two little bugs, or maybe they’re just one bug.
@Mark: 1) ah, OK, so that’s out there then. I thought that mighta been a hiccup with the 3.0 port, but I reckon not. Basically, MT installs started at 1 for entry #’s and ran on up from there. I rely on that “feature” to do some smart downloading for the Links: if it found a local ID that was higher than the latest one on the server, it would stop downloading links – given that TypePad ID’s are way the hell higher than 1 to n entries that you have, that’s gotta be screwin up that… something awful. I didn’t look at the code yet, but that’s something I’ll look into soon, to be sure. Especially if I’m using it :)
2) Same thing as 1, since it adds the link to the list, when it’s done posting :) Same reason why Edit in Browser won’t work… the whole change to the Edit/ID stuff. Besides the Edit in browser bit is sorta moot with Edit in place
All of this might force me to patch 2.5, since I don’t know when I can make 3.0 available (or when it will be done for that matter – all of these blog concerns are keeping me out of the compiler…) but I dunno that I wanna fork the source code at this point, 1/2 way thru a porting process… sorta a rock and a hard place, that (and probably surprising that I would be so aware of “business level” decisions for a side project… force of habit!)