Published Sep 21, 2008

You may have noticed that it was impossible to comment here for a while. Then, if you follow very closely, you may have noticed that things looked a little funny here for a while. I’d like to say that was “growing pains” but really it was “middle-aged creaky pains.” The upshot is that this blog has been updated to Movable Type 4.21 and everything should be better than ever now. Hopefully not in the way that a 47-year-old guy buys a Boxster to distract himself from creaky knees that give him a big old 1” vertical leap at the gym basketball court.

The backstory is this: I hadn’t run a mandatory security update about a year and a quarter ago, and I suffered the consequences when security actually got compromised. So I upgraded things to the first secure version but somehow the commenting didn’t work on that. Since the first secure version was that year and a quarter old, I couldn’t find any discussion of what had gone wrong and couldn’t fix it. So I upgraded to the exciting newest version, and things worked even less.

Every page you see here is generated by having some content I enter into Movable Type automatically applied to a template I’ve designed. Well, the template design language changed slightly in the latest version of Movable Type, and some plugins I had installed had changed their behavior slightly or no longer worked with the new version. The result was that I couldn’t publish updates (or take comments!). This was all exacerbated by the fact that I’ve been using the same templates since Movable Type version 2.6, so, with the upgrades through version 3, 3.2, 3.3, and now to version 4, you can imagine the cruft that was in my templates.

A couple of days of work later, I’ve finally grokked the changes in MT and updated everything to work.

The meaning to you as a user is: Not too much. Mostly, I ran forward to stay in the same place. You may notice three things:

  • The ads are gone. Seems like you all — my intrepid readers — hated them. So you all now owe me about a lunch each.
  • You can log in to comment using your TypeKey ID — which is the way we’ve been doing things for a couple of years now — or your LiveJournal ID, or your OpenID, which may include your Yahoo! ID, your MySpace ID, your AOL Screen Name, your Verisign ID, or even your WordPress ID, or it may not, I haven’t tested. Tell me how it goes for you if you try it out. Anyway, the point is, commenting should now be more convenient.
  • The front page Junior logo has been replaced by an electoral vote counter. Because it’s important. Obviously, this’ll change when the election is over; hope you like it ‘til then!

Enjoy! Tell me what you think.

2 Comments

I think all your hard work fixing your bloggy blog will be well worth it!

Update: since nobody’s using the OpenID or LJ log-ins, but they seem to be confusing people, I’ve turned them off.