I’m a moron. I’m coming out of the moron closet. I did not follow the instructions in upgrading from Movable Type 2.x to 3.11. I’m in pain right now. It is geek pain, caused by running upgrade scripts in the wrong order. Oops. So much for best practices and doing things to a production server.

For some reason, my hosting provider, who shall not be named as of this writing, pulled the plug on blurbomat yesterday afternoon. I changed my .htaccess file and after that all hell broke loose. I was going to write something meaningful about 9/11 and couldn’t.

I tried to post and my server exploded. I had to call this morning and ask why my account at my host was suspended. They couldn’t answer me and eventually re-activated my account. After more weirdness, I called again and they were having some severe mySQL issues. After stepping away from the computer and sharing some wonderful Leta time while Heather napped (nap!!!), I decided that I’d scrap everything and just rebuild blurbomat. Just to be safe.

Turns out I didn’t need to do that. I did a backup of my database using phpadmin, and then cleared the data from the tables and reimported after reloading Movable Type. I could not have done this without the assistance of Brad Choate, superstar supreme and a score of a hire for Six Apart. I know the other Six Apart developers aren’t chopped liver, but Brad went the extra mile in helping fix the mess I had made. Thanks to Mr. Choate and a great set of plugins, this site is dynamically generated (but you should’t be able to tell the difference). Six Apart has done a great job in making the move to dynamic publishing easy. If I hadn’t cocked it up, I’m certain I wouldn’t have had the issues I did. Thank you Brad!

Yesterday, I flirted briefly with dynamic publishing on dooce.com, but after seeing the results of non-Movable Type 3.11 friendly plug-ins, hastily rebuilt dooce.com using static pages. Once the plug-ins are ported to php, we’ll make the move and decruft the URLs on dooce. Once I start playing on this site, I’ll have more of a toolkit to help Heather make dooce.com better.

People ask why I’m choosing to stay with Movable Type. In an email exchange I said that I felt the product had more polish than the other options. Not to say that WordPress and Textpattern aren’t awesome. They are. But for me, Movable Type combines everything in a balanced way. You get a lot of power along with a lot of flexibility. There are great people working on the other apps, and I think it’s good that there is competition in this space, but from what I’ve seen in the move to selectable/adjustable dynamic site generation, Movable Type is robust in ways that I’m just beginning to learn.

Finally, thanks to everybody for the great suggestions and please accept my apology if you tried to leave a comment in the last couple of days and couldn’t. Hopefully things are ironed out and working well. Unless you’re a spammer. If you are a spammer, I’m not sorry at all. And I’ve got tools to deal with you bitches.

In other news, tomorrow is Leta’s MRI. I’m extremely nervous. While I think we’ve caught the torticullis in time, I don’t know what else we might see. It’s this unknown that scares me more than anything else. I will try to be strong for Heather, as I know it’s going to be a stressful day. Thank you to everybody who has sent kind wishes and stories. There are so many people in this world who have it worse than we do. Bless the parents who struggle with harder things every day. We are so lucky. I’m certain we’ll both have something to say once the day is over. I’m certain that things will be okay. Leta, you are loved.