Like A Phoenix
I apologize if you’ve been inundated with old posts on the site and in your RSS feeds.
Last week a third-party plug-in was causing my Movable Type administration area to crash. In turn, I tried to fix the problem and I made more work for myself than I needed to (It had to do with Twitter Tools and and what I think was a conflict with a Perl module upgrade by my hosting provider). I learned some things. Good news is, the site is running better than ever.
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Daily Exhaust is back online.
The main lesson I learned is Movable Type is not getting better with age—at least in my experience with it on a shared-server environment (I’m not the only one). Part of what took me so long to get this site back up was installing and testing multiple dot-releases of Movable Type 5. As of this writing, the latest release is 5.2.2 and it ran exponentially slower than the version I had previously installed, 5.02. Luckily MT includes the install version number in the HTML Head section.
I’m not interested in exporting everything over to WordPress because WordPress doesn’t have static publishing like Movable Type does. Despite the broken links and embedded video objects from the last 7 years, static publishing gives me a complete archive that isn’t contingent on backend server to work.
At the end of the day, Daily Exhaust is about publishing words and images and Movable Type does that well. No it’s not as advanced as platforms like Squarespace (which I use over at The Combustion Chamber), but it doesn’t need to be.