PhotoDude.com

Sun. Jun 20, 2004

All My Content Under One Roof

The last time I moved my ponderous lump of a web site to a new server, there was much whining:

Movable Type and MySQL have combined to thoroughly mop up the new web server with my tattered remains. I am humbled before mere text documents, though some of them be large and ornery.

So I’m starting over. I’m going to manually add the entries from September … And then I’m moving on. Damn it. Over the next few days, I’ll try to pick up the pieces and flesh out the content here. But not right now.

All the old content isn’t “lost,” and no links have been broken. I was paranoid enough to do a full backup of the HTML files in addition to the MT export. But there’s now over 2000 entries and over 3400 comments that are “out of the loop.” No longer searchable in one place, and not archived all together on their category pages. There’s now a dichotomy; the content built on the old server, now static and barred to further manipulation or cataloging, and the new content built on this server, represented mostly by this entry. It defeats the whole purpose of a “content management system.”

I feel a loss.

And, frankly, it makes me mad.

So here we are again 9 months later, in the same situation … post-move. But I’m not mad. I’m not happy. I’m … demi-orgasmic.

Since January of 2001, I have written 2,177 articles for this site, which have gotten 4,210 comments, and if you placed it all in one text document, it would be over 21 MB. January, 2001, is when I switched away from Blogger after using it for the first six months I had a weblog. I moved to Greymatter, and then a year later moved to Movable Type. Now I use Textpattern. This “can’t settle down” approach to Blogware resulted in a complete hodgepodge of content, with no consistency in appearance or even URL form, with everything prior to last September left hangin’ out there static, tied together only by a Google search.

Just one example (using pages that contain functions that don’t work on this server, but you’ll get the idea…): I wrote an article in January 2001 about switching from Blogger to Greymatter. Here is it as it was written at that time and posted by Greymatter. And here it is as it was later imported into Movable Type. And that’s where it was stuck, static and inflexible.

No more. All of my 3.5 years of content is now under one MySQL roof, controlled by Textpattern. Searchable, browsable, manipulable (right down to a massive page listing every article in every category). A 3.5 year old article like the above can now be linked in its new form, and it, along with the other couple thousand articles, will automagically take on whatever template changes I make to the site. Dynamically, with no rebuilding.

Ironically, this was largely made possible because an 8 MB text file that MT exported on one server but refused to import on another (eliciting the whining at the start of this article) ... Textpattern would import. It just sucked 3 years of content right into the existing database, erasing the woe cause by MT’s failure to do so last September, and making me wish Dean had gotten started on Textpattern a lot earlier.

But I’ll take it anyway.

There’s still some minor things that are a bit gimpy (especially in IE … but what else is new), but I’m totally jazzed by the things that do work. Like that little search box in the top of the left column. It’s blazingly fast, and accurate.

So, poke around all you want. I think you’ll find the move went well, thanks to Textpattern’s capabilities, and the server performance at TextDrive. In fact, moving MT was such a breeze (especially compared to last time) that I posted a tutorial on it in the TextDrive forum: “Transferring a Movable Type database and setup to TextDrive.”

Try it, you’ll like it.