MovableType

Comment searching disabled.

Unfortunately I’ve had to disable the ability to search the comments on this blog as apparently the script was using up too much memory. I ran a search this afternoon and ended up with the generic 500 Server error page. Looking through the error log (which can be found in ~/logs/errors/domain name/http/error.log for dreamhost users) I found that mt search page was being killed before completing but only if I used the SearchElement=both on the absoblogginlutely blog (the other blogs are fine). I must admit I am a bit surprised at that as I only have 3103 posts and 1446 comments so I wouldn’t have thought this would put *that* much strain on a server. Dreamhost just said that I was “using too much memory” and to check the MovableType forums for support 🙁 I did a quick search and that recommended fastsearch, but this doesn’t support searching comments either, so for the time being the search will only do the content (although interestingly I can search with no errors from the admin interface).

Hopefully this won’t be the same in MovableType4 which I might get around to upgrading too one day.

Update The feature is back – after clearing out the junk comments the feature started working again.

Windows Live Writer working now.

Thanks to Neil and Bryan, I’ve solved the problem I had and got Windows Live Writer working with MovableType now. When you set up a user in MT you set up a Web Services Password for each user. This is not the same as the one used for your standard login. The details can be found by going to the Main Menu, System Overview, Authors and then selecting your username. Down at the bottom is the information required with a reveal button to show the password. Thanks guys!

Windows Live Writer to MovableType

For some reason, my installation of Windows Liver Writer will not allow me to select any of my other MT blogs (apart from the main one) when I go to set up an account. Instead I get the not useful error message “An error occurred while attempting to connect to your weblog: Blog Server Error – Server Error 1 Occurred Invalid Login You must correct this error before proceeding.”

I know the password is correct as I’ve just used it to log into the system.

Another annoyance is the version number of WLW. Help/About displays the following version – 1.0 (12.0.1183.516) – nowhere does it mention that this is beta2. As the WLW website also doesn’t tell you which build Beta2 is, it is pretty hard to tell whether you are on the latest version or not.

MovableType4 beta

The first hurdle of installing MovableType beta4 is that the download page does some fancy redirection to push the download to your browser which is not helpful if you have disabled ftp upload up to your dreamhost website and want to download it via wget from within a shell. However there are a couple of sites that point to a direct location that was made public when the beta was first released so you can get it (for now) from sippey. There is a nice tutorial on installing MT4 on dreamhost

MT4 beta released.

Interesting to see that MovableType beta 4 is released. This came the day after I spent some looking around to see how to get a static page built into MT for an “about me” page for this website. I want to be able to edit this file from within MT (for ease of use) and then publish the updated contents. Apparently that is only really possible through the use of pulling in another blog until version 4 comes out….So I might be upgrading to 4 beta soon. Alternatively if I have to go through the pain of migrating again it may be worth upgrading to WordPress instead (which seems to be where most of the development is taking place now)

Comment spam ramps up a notch

I’m not sure if moving to the new host is the reason, but I’ve had a lot of comment spam come through MovableType today (all of which was moderated) but annoyingly I couldn’t permanently delete it as my computer did not have the new ip address for the domain name!
I have added another captcha, Comment challengeto our blogs. Hopefully it is not too difficult for you to answer the question correctly.

MT Upgrade

Finally got around to upgrading to version 3.x of MovableType. I saw the notice that they had an important security fix come out just before we went on holiday and today has been the first day I’ve had a chance to sit down and look at the upgrade path. Almost everything looks good (the interface looks REALLY nice but when I click on Kristen’s or my blog in the main menu page I get the error message

Can’t call method “entry_id” on an undefined value at lib/MT/App/CMS.pm line 1956.

Not sure why I get this message on two of the blogs when the other blogs seem to be fine.

Can’t install MT (at the moment) on Uniform Server

I’ve just tried to get MovableType working on Uniform Server (using Mysql as the database) and it doesn’t work. The installation check routine fails because dbd::mysql is not installed and it needs the dbi module installed. This does not come with Uniform Server and is not going to be present until version 3.3 comes out (if then). This is a shame as I was hoping to try an installation of MT and import of my data to my local machine to test my backups and DR capabilities.
Plan B is to install MT over on my over hosting company but thats a project for another day as I’m sure my eyes are going all funny now.