January 30, 2003

Why I ever bothered with

Why I ever bothered with Movable Type, I don't know. Installing it was a little tricky, but I understood that since it was the first time I really played around with perl scripts.

Now, I have this really nice design all ready and waiting (thanks, Joni). You'd love it, and I'd love to show you. All that's left is to import my old posts. Based on the manual, it appears to be a simple thing to do--WRONG! After following the instructions to the letter (including using the MT import template laid out in glorious code), you'd think all the old entries would be installed into MT nicely--WRONG! I had two years of posts, but each of them contained nothing. That took up two days of screaming at MT through my monitor. Thanks to Joni (again), I have an import file I can use. What she did, I have no idea.

The "Power Editing" feature is powerless. There's no way I can find to quickly select 1800+ entries and switch them to "publish" status. Clicking a little check box 1800 times is not something I'm going to do.

And heaven forbid MT provide an error message so I know something went wrong when I tried to import a 1.2 mb file.

Then there's this problem I have with my database (mysql) numbering. Since I've imported 1800+ entries a few times, even if I deleted my weblog and stared a new one, the first entry is in the 5000s. Why MT can't reset the number is just plain dumb.

This is starting to interfere with my posting. The last few times I've gone online, I've tried to do some MT work with little success. Then I get ticked off, scream, and find something better to do.

If MT is the wave of the weblogging future, I may return to hand coding. Even with Blogger's periodic problems, so far it's much easier to use than MT. An MT fan right now, I'm not.