Geodog

Geodog is back

I am back up and running, after a week's absence. What a pain it has been. For some still unknown reason, the Berkeley DB that Movable Type uses got corrupted. See my posts on the MT forums if you are really interested in the gritty details of how I figured this out. My hosting provider, phpwebhosting, who usually does a pretty good job, claims that nothing changed on my server. I am not aware of any "out of disk space" errors. So why or how did it get corrupted? Shades of my old experiences with Radio, which is what made me move over to Movable Type.

In order to recover my blog, I had to go through all my old posts and convert the information into the form required by MovableType's import format. At this point, I discovered I had made some unfortunate choices when editing my templates, such as getting rid of the seconds in the time format.

An alpha geek might have whipped up a perl script to do this in an hour. A sensible person might have just resigned himself to a long evening or two of tedious of cutting and pasting and retyping.

In my case, not being sensible person, and being a wannabe geek instead of a real alpha geek, I decided to take the opportunity to learn the macro language of my text editor, NoteTab Pro. Side note: I have been using NoteTab for years now. It is the Swiss army knife of text editors. Versatile, simple to use, but also very powerful. Highly recommended.

Add problems with my neighbor's new 802.11b wireless network putting mine out of commission and a child with scarlet fever, and it has taken me a while to get back up and running. But I am back up now, having reinstalled Movable Type, this time running on MySQL, with an additional 100 Meg of disk space purchased, and plans to back up on a regular basis. The only thing that seems to be lost is the majority of comments. Sorry Mom, and sorry guys who disagreed with my position on SUV's.

What I learned:
Sh*t happens, especially with tech. But I knew that, right?
Phil via email, Robert on his blog and Girlie on the MT support forums are really helpful, but when you are screwed, you are screwed. Thanks for trying, folks.
NoteTab is a powerful program with decent documentation.
Movable Type is a powerful program with great documentation. As someone who wrote tech doc in a previous incarnation, I know how hard it is to write good tech doc. The Trotts succeeded.
It could save you a lot of time in the future to take a look at the import documentation, and make sure that you produce the data required in your archives, even if it is just within an HTML comment.
Back up regularly. But I knew that, right?