I've been posting a lot recently about switching from my trusted and well-understood Linux installation over to my new Microsoft system. I've actually got enough of these posts now that I've started a new category (it's called From Debian to Server 2003 over on the right) so in case you're interested in, you know, just things as geeky as that...well, there you go.
The latest saga in my migration involves Movable Type. Manuel asked me yesterday why I chose Movable Type (MT) originally. I couldn't really give him a good answer—I remember seeing that a few of my friends had used it, and I figured I'd give it a shot. I didn't search around a whole lot because I was really itching to get into writing in a journal and didn't really care what the featureset was as long as it let me publish posts.
Since I chose MT originally, I'm sortof stuck with it. There aren't a lot of good ways to migrate from Arbitrary Blog Software A to Arbitrary Blog Software B without a lot of table mangling. As much as I'd really like to spend a week hacking through SQL queries and regexes (remember, I'd have to mangle archive links as well as moving the tables around) I'd much rather just stick with the software I've got originally.
So now I have this problem that I've got MT v3.15—the free version of which supports multiple authors on one machine. MT v3.2 (the current version) does not support multiple authors on one box. And since I'm moving from Linux to Win32, I have to download something—and MT 3.15 isn't available anymore.
Yesterday I bit the bullet and paid my $70. Now I've got a copy of MT which handles up to five authors and which comes with full support.
This would have been helpful. It turns out that the MT people haven't really explored the IIS installation as much as they could have.
It turns out that there's a relative path issue that keeps MT from working on your system unless you've got MT installed in your IIS www root—which I don't. It took a good three hours of dicking around to figure out that the MT files have to be patched so they have full paths instead of relative paths in the script headers. Damn.
But in any event, the migration looks to have worked.
Somewhat unfortunately, the migration occured with files that were "new" on Wednesday night—and since then, both Layla and I have both posted and received comments. So I have to redo everything again when I actually change servers.
But it was good to go through the process once. The moral of the story here? Things don't always work well on platforms for which they weren't originally designed. Bummer.
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