Recently in Blog Category

Movable Type 5.2.2.  Trying to mark comments as spam from the comments RSS feed - clicking on "junk".  Multiple spam messages on the one entry, so multiple attempts to publish to the same entry.  Get these errors:

Renaming tempfile '/path/to/page.html.new' failed: Renaming '/path/to/page.html.new' to '/path/to/page.html' failed: No such file or directory

And then the page is deleted until I go into the entries management and republish it.

This is so fricken fail.  And yet I can't find anyone talking about the same thing, other than the odd comment in people's blogs where people have obviously had the same problem when commenting on an entry at the exact time as someone else.

I discovered a while back that if I mark various comments as spam directly from the notifications I get and do a whole lot at once, I can end up in a situation where temporary files lock each other out, and if I'm not careful I could lose individual blog pages or even whole month archives unless I carefully republish.  

Tonight I lost my blog's index page completely when my brother was commenting on an entry at the same time I was publishing another entry.  I have such a low-volume site (and humans rarely comment) that it's not usually a problem, but if I was getting a lot of comments I'd be pretty worried about MT just eating my content ..

Why?

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Why do people still read my drivel?  I don't have anything interesting to say.  Apart from the odd rant I don't say anything personal.  Even reading my entries from some years back it seems my blog style has changed somewhat.  I think I put more emphasis on getting photos online.  And I talk a lot less about work since moving to Canberra.  In fact during the week I often go for days without posting, simply because nothing out of the ordinary happened, and it seems better to leave the day blank rather than filling it up with fluff.  

So why?  Why are you still here?

Ten Years

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So this little blog turned ten years old today!

Happy blogiversary to me! heh

Ten years, or a quarter of my life in writing and online.  Ten pretty big years with a lot of ups and downs, four big overseas holidays, a wedding, a new house, a new job.  And mostly all chronicled here, to varying levels of detail.

I had no idea when I started this blog how dependent on it I would become.  Simply as an easy place to find when I did things or find a photo to show someone.  A place to put photos online for friends/family/strangers. My only regret with the blog is not starting it earlier (even though there really wasn't such a thing much before 2003).

I had wanted to update the style/design of the blog, but ran out of time, on account of being away the entire Christmas holiday, and having last weekend taken up by simply FTPing files up and down.  So I may get something new online in the next little while.  Maybe.  The best I could do was update a few things like the footer, my blogroll and the site description, add navigation links to each entry, and republish the whole site (took twenty seven minutes this time).

Thanks to everyone that's come along for the ride, it's been great!

MT 5.2.2

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So after spending all day yesterday downloading a snapshot of my blog, and all of this morning uploading 5.2.2 to my host (their SSH appears to be down at the moment, so couldn't download and unzip on the host itself), I think I have upgraded this blog to Movable Type 5.2.2. 

I had to upload the support/themes directory to get my old theme content, as well as the reCAPTCHA and Gravatar plugins directories but I think that was about it.  

I've tested creating a new entry and commenting on it, but not comments on any old entries.

There's some more changes I want to make in the next few days, but if you notice anything broken in the meantime please let me know! (comments are currently broken on all old entries until I republish the site, which I'll do in a couple of days - I only want to do it once, as it'll probably take half an hour to run!)

Testing

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This could be interesting...

Placeholders

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Putting in some placeholder documents.  Might fill them in later if I could be stuffed.

ImageMagick

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So I ran mt-check.cgi and discovered this:

Image::Magick

Your server does not have Image::Magick installed, or Image::Magick requires another module that is not installed. This module is needed if you would like to be able to create thumbnails of uploaded images. Please consult the installation instructions for help in installing Image::Magick.


So I guess my thumbnails are never going to work.

*sigh*
As discussed in several previous blog entries, my hosting provider changed something the other day, and since then the thumbnails over there on the right aren't being generated.  I could spend hours figuring how movable type creates those thumbnails, or I could just delete the widget.  Apart from my mother, who actually comes to my homepage to view my blog, and would miss the widget if I deleted it?
Even though I fixed the permissions on the main blog admin script, and the comments script, whenever I upload images the little widget on the side is not getting the image url.  Trying to figure out what script needs its permissions fixed ....

Mega hummer
Still can't get it to work.  I'm wondering if they've also broken the ability of php to generate images.  They broke something a while back which forced me to use recaptcha instead of the inbuilt captcha generator.  Of course they denied all knowledge of any changes back then too. 
Kazza's "Boring Life Of a Geek" aka BLOG

IT geek, originally from Sydney, moved to Canberra in 2007. Married to "the sweetie", aka Stu. Prolific photographer, Lego junkie and tropical fish keeper.

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