Annual Server Migration…
The unannounced server migration that I started on Monday has not gone as smoothly as I would have liked, but I didn’t really expect it to.
Why the move? Twenty times the storage, five times the bandwidth, less than half the cost. I’ll save myself about $1,000 a year.
So far, the biggest problem has been migrating over the Movable Type v2.63 blogging system. My old server at Interland used Berkeley DB v1.65, while the new one at Spry uses Berkeley DB v1.75. Considering that Berkeley DB is actually up to version 4 point something these days, you’d think that the difference between the two 1.XX versions wouldn’t be all that significant. Well, the new server can’t even begin to read the data generated on the old server. They’re totally incompatible. And, of course, neither server has an appropriate db_upgrade application installed. I tried replacing the 1.75 version on the new server with the older 1.65 version. It refused to recognize the older version. Then, after scrounging through the Movable Type documentation and source code for a while, I discovered the option of upgrading to MySQL instead of using Berkeley DB. But the question was, even if I manage to convert it, how do I move it over to Spry. No idea. Then I had the brilliant idea of converting it to MySQL while specifying that the new database was on the new server hosted at Spry. Worked like a charm! A totally automatic process!
The next huge issue was the fact that I was also changing domains name for the blogs. Kimberly’s Keystrokes is now under www.kimlecour.com/, RR… is now hosted here on its own domain, The Soapbox is on www.oursoapbox.com, and the GeoROCKS! and Cortney’s Corner blogs have moved to their respective domains. That means that the URLs of all links around all the blogs had to change, as well as the image URLs. Plus there’s a completely different (and more organized) structure to the archived blog pages that a simple search and replace won’t fix, thanks to the new year/month schema. And that’s not even including all the links WITHIN the articles that had to be updated. One blog mentioned an article in another blog, and so on. Each had to be addressed, most individually.
Domains that are fully operational so far: this one (of course), kimlecour.com, nogosek.com (once Joe updates the nameservers), oursoapbox.com, cortney.us, and georocks.us. I could also count amobilenotary.com, richardlecour.com, cageocoins.com, spunglass.com, and rdlnational.com because they’re technically complete, but I didn’t have to really do anything to them since they’re either new, undeveloped websites, or only had basic setup information to transition.
Onward I plod…
I suppose that explains some of why your pages haven’t seemed to change for a few days, despite my liberal use of the refresh button. Actually stumbled across the change this AM when refresh gave a “not found” like error for Kim’s page and I resorted to the link from lecour.us.
My first vague thought on your new year/month schema was that it’s interesting you don’t use the day. Figured you had your reasons, perhaps because you occasionally write more than one per day. But anyway, another idle thought had me scanning back to recent Fridays to see how much of your daily intake the cookies accounted for and I noticed, starting with “Fast Food Diet: Day 20″ and proceeding forward, the pages were: 001568.html, 001569.html, 001570.html, 001564.html, 001571.html, 001573.html, 001575.html, 001576.html, 001580.html, 001578.html, 001582.html. So why the gaps and staggered order?
The new MovableType 3.0 and higher uses a similar schema, but they include days under separate subdirectories (or you can continue using the old style of lumping everything together in one directory.) I didn’t like either system. It’s like any classification system: too few or too many elements within a category make it less meaningful. The new MT also makes the filename the title of the article; and that really sucks — especially when there are name changes to articles — because links are difficult to maintain or detect, and often remain broken. Both issues you raised are actually related. The six blogs I currently host all use the same MT v2.63 system. Each entry has a unique entry ID, the number you see at the end of the URL. Gaps indicate that other blogs that have been added in the meantime, and staggering is an indication of when I added the entry. I often have several blogs in progress and they are often added out of chronological order. For example, if I hadn’t deleted the three-word soapbox blog you never finished writing back in early 2003 (a year and a half ago), and you were to have miraculously completed it today, it would have had a entryID in the low hundreds as opposed to today’s 1590 number.
- RDL
What three words?