I've migrated all the blogs to MT3 now, and so far the anti-spam plugin SpamLookup has done an even better job than MT-Blacklist did, sparing us from almost all comment and trackback spam.
There's still some detail work left for the various bloggers to do, to re-create the formatting customizations that I didn't bring over. Thanks to everyone for their patience during the transition.
The server hosting stblogs.org died again with a bad disk. Apparently the hosting provider page-zone.com doesn't make enough money off the 358 domains hosted on this one machine to pay for disk mirroring. Aargh.
Here's a little history of my recent tech support cases: I don't have records of the ones from June '03 to Jan '04.
Feb '04: I got cut off for exceeding the bandwidth limit, so I upgraded the account. I paid up, but they didn't increase the limit setting until I got cut off again two days later and asked about it.
Mar '04: I started getting warnings about the limit again: they hadn't done all the settings properly. And they cut off shell access in the process!
Dec '04: While trying to investigate a problem somebody else's software was causing, they disabled my Movable Type software, and then they forgot about it.
Feb '05: Web stats broke: after I asked, they re-installed the program.
Feb '05: The temporary filesystem /tmp filled up, and the web server stopped working. This is the sort of thing that they should be monitoring automatically. They removed the files filling up /tmp.
Feb '05: When spammers attacked stblogs.org, PZ disabled the whole site, instead of the one part the spammers were attacking. And they didn't contact me.
Apr '05: After a system failure and rebuild, some software I needed (HTML::Template) didn't get re-installed. When I asked for it, they installed it. On the wrong server.
Apr '05: AGAIN! I upgraded the site and they failed to raise my bandwidth limit accordingly.
May '05: A software upgrade causes the Perl database software DBD::mysql to fail. I worked around this myself by installing my own copy of a working version.
Jul '05: A disk dies; again they didn't re-install HTML::Template, so I fixed this one myself too. And re-installed the DBD::mysql.
Some of the blogs here at stblogs.org are using optional TypeKey(tm) authentication, but a bug makes it a bit awkward.
At present, after a user logs in through TypeKey, he should be returned to the pop-up comment window. However, the user's browser is redirected to an invalid URL: a slash character "/" is dropped out of the string. I've reported this bug to SixApart (the makers of Movable Type and TypeKey).
If you run across this problem, the work-around is easy: go back to the blog entry and click on the "Comments" link again to re-launch the pop-up window. It'll work fine the second time.
Update: This is fixed. The MT folks responded (late in the evening!) with two possible configuration changes to try. The second one did the trick. Really, then, this isn't a bug, but a configuration mistake on my part. Maybe I could say it wasn't documented well in the mt.cfg file, but it is documented in the installation manual.
Posting has been slow lately on the stblogs.org sites because of a malfunction on the system hosting them. By upgrading another software package on the machine, the people at our hosting provider made MT break. Here's info on the problem in case any other MT webmasters have been seeing the same problems.
To workaround the problem, I installed a private copy of Perl modules DBI and DBD::mysql, to take them both back to a slightly earlier version. That seems to have corrected the trouble.
Update: (7/9) The author of DBD put out an updated version, which helped somewhat, but the problem remains when authors post or re-save long entries. I'm continuing to check for progress from the developers.
In case you have any trouble posting comments or (for you authors) posting your entries: we're having a technical problem. A whole bunch of MT users are experiencing it too, and it appears to have happened because web hosting providers installed a software upgrade that includes a defective Perl module, which makes MT break. So far I haven't seen any data lost, but page rebuilds sometimes aren't performed when you submit an entry. I've asked our hosting provider to roll back their software change to a slightly earlier and more reliable version.
