Tame My Mind

I spent most of today from about 9:15am to about 6:30pm installing and configuring Movable Type 4.01, and moving the Tame My Mind - Cheryl's Arts 'n' Crafts blog to a new directory. Please change your links to http://www.tamemymind.com/blog/. This new URL allows me to re-title this blog - which is right now just Tame My Mind - at will without the URL being inconsistent. Redirects have been placed in an .htaccess file at the old URL, but that is only a temporary fix to help prevent most broken links.

After a few hours, moving around the MT 4 administrative interface was second nature. It's slow, but the layout is good. Display of the blog itself is still quick.

I like being able to create Pages that aren't date-based entries in the blog. I like that MT 4's Search and Replace works in the Keywords field too - I put thumbnail images in the Keywords field and place that field at the top of entries before the Body. I like the auto-save feature. But, why does the Rich Text format use <b> instead of <strong>?

I miss being able to save and rebuild a template or template module after modifying it - having to rebuild, err, publish the index templates to check a change I've made to a template, template module, sidebar, or widget and publish all to have those changes show up on each entry is a pain. The MT 4 documentation on dynamic publishing doesn't explain clearly enough how it works, but I may give it a try.

Subcategories are imported as top-level categories, so subcategories with the same name were imported into the same top-level category! Ack! For example, entries assigned the subcategory of Crochet > General or Knit > General were combined into General - not what I wanted. That issue required removing all entries from the new blog, changing all categories in the old blog to top-level categories with unique names (example: Crochet General, Knit General), re-exporting, re-importing into the new blog, and re-publishing. The import procedure on the new blog then created all of those uniquely-named top-level categories. The redirects in the .htaccess file take the category/subcategory changes into account.

Then I discovered the default basename (filename) for MT 4 is 30 characters and since the assigned basename for entries is not exported, all entries imported into the new blog had truncated filenames with a maximum of 30 characters. This wouldn't have been a problem if the old blog didn't use the full entry title (longer than 30 characters in many cases) as the filename. So, I modified the archive path for the Entry archive template, removed all date-based folders, category folders, and pages folder from the server, and published all again.

There were other hiccups which caused me to have to remove folders and re-publish multiple times.

By the way, there are only 649 entries and only 388 comments as of this moment. To publish all takes about 45 minutes. Ridiculous. Oh, and to publish 1 entry takes almost 35 seconds. Also ridiculous.

In the past, I've looked into WordPress, but just haven't been able to dig into the spaghetti (and thorough) documentation and Template Tags enough to really understand WP. Movable Type makes more sense to me. However, 45 minutes to publish all entries when the header, footer, sidebar, a template module or a widget is modified makes it worth looking into again. (Besides, understanding WordPress will come in handy at work too - WP is free and free is good for colleges.)