I'm finally reinstalling the blog software tonight to solve the errors, also upgrading to Movable Type 3.3. I'm suspending commenting for a while so things don't disappear when I input the backup. After that I'll still be tweaking things and probably adding a captcha or other form of spam control. Maybe a chess version of kittenauth?! I'm currently being bombarded with several hundred comment spams per day. The filter catches 99.5%, but the load is notable.
When I'm done with the major lifting I'll post an all-clear here and turn commenting back on. Then you can notify me of problems you find. I'll be updating the templates as well, but that's not critical and will take a few days. If the whole thing goes down and you get 404 errors, sorry. Thanks for your exasperation.
Update: As you can see, things didn't go too well on the data front. The data corruption that was causing the errors we were experiencing made it impossible to correctly export it all, starting on June 1. I'm apparently going to have to reenter every entry since them, but that doesn't include comments. I can manually insert links to my backup pages for each entry from June to now, which sounds rather hellish and won't be my top priority today. The good news is that the back-end is doing great, much faster and more stable now on MySQL.
Update 2: Found a fairly fast way to reenter two months worth of blog thanks to the mightiest utility in the land, Clipmate. Powerpaste rocks. I think I've also come up with a lesser evil way to get the comments back for June-July. No, not entering all 2000+ of them into the system one at a time. But pasting them into the "extended" entry field will at least make them available. Not sure what they'll look like just yet but at least they'll be readily available and new comments will appear below them in a fairly natural way.
Update 3: Okay, all the comments are back for June-July, slapped into the extended entry and without formatting. Commenting is also back on. Now to the templates so the item pages look right. I'll get to the search and monthly archive templates later. At least the admin is three times faster than it was before. I'll also be doing categories and tags in a few days. There are probably some broken links and such. Post issues and bugs here.
Update 4: Seems like all is well, although I need to import the notification list somehow. Any bloggers out there want to test out the trackback system with this item?
Testing the commenting system...
Want an outsider test? :-)
please no captcha tests - they are so time consuming!!!
testing to find out what the hell Trackback does...
any comments about howard stern's recent interest in chess?
he claimed to be on icc, with a 440 rating after two games. seems impossible.
Yeah, what does "Trackback" do?
If you don't know what it is, you can't help me! It's basically automatic reciprocal linking, you add a link to one of my items from your blog and a link back to your blog appears under the trackbacks for that item. It makes it both easier to link to items from your blog and can also lead traffic back to you. I've never bothered to use it since the potential usage is low and the potential for spam exists. But I figured since I'm fooling with new stuff this week I'd toss it out there and see if anyone uses it. I get so much traffic that I imagine it couldn't but help expand our horizons a bit.
just trying out how much html editing is allowed...
Textbox with margins and padding - does it work?
Whoa.
hmm...
if you html edit your text, even css-stuff shows up on the preview page - but not in the blog. You might want to delete that "you may use html tags" note in the preview page then.
Hmm, I thought I deleted the preview option but somehow it came back. I'll get rid of it in the next update. Few people use it.
No html in comments in the future, btw.
alert('Cheap hack');
Man, Shternshain, if there's 2 things you Jewish guys can do they're :
(1) Tell a Joke.
(2) Start a war.
UI bug?: not all the posts separated by lines between them
---------
testing inspired by macuga's effort:)
uh..ok, no HTML allowed.. infact it might go for Mig's approval before getting posted
bold and ital
Darn, it stripped away my JavaScript tags. Smart, that.
It surprises me that only few people used the preview option. At the message boards I use it practically for each post.
(Why no HTML? Hübner —)
Looks like some basic HTML entities work at least. That's good.
It can do non ASCII but no tags. I just don't see any reason for html tags in the comments. It just becomes a distraction from what I've seen. Eventually everyone goes to bold and italics or colors or whatever. Annoying.
I see the Cat Blogging function currently isn't working either :)
Copy Paste still doesn't work properly.
http://www.getfirefox.com
:-)
I don't know if this is connected with the changes, but I have a customised google homepage with the rss feed from chessdirt as one of the items - but since the new construction it seems to have stopped working (just the daily dirt feed - the others are fine).
http://www.googlemodules.com/module/881/
BTW - please have a preview function :(
Yes, the RSS has gone wonky, not sure why. Not top priority (templates and tags first) but it's on the list. Thanks.
I don't see any need for a preview when there is no HTML allowed in the comments. Your post will look exactly like it does in the box except for links being made active automatically. It's not really a problem but it's another template to mess with.
Yes,&nspb;it looks really like in the box... ;-)
Different people in all countries get the loan from various creditors, just because this is fast and easy.