Writer's block, an owner's guide: Installing Movable Type
I’ve migrated this blog to the popular Movable Type software. The advantage of this for the Today I Write project is that it allows me to organize my different articles into categories. For a while now, I’ve been trying to edit all the posts so as to create a collection of articles about writer’s block. I wanted to build a traditional website alongside my blog; that was the purpose of the blog (and still is), to be a seedbed for material that would grow and flourish elsewhere.
But it was soon obvious that maintaining a blog and a static web site was inefficient. So now I’m trying a new approach, the sensible approach of running the whole project as one professional-grade blog, which gives me all the editing and publishing power I need.
It’s mandatory to write about the experience of migrating to Movable Type, and goodness knows I’ve had a fun few days installing the software on the server and then playing with templates and so on; but I’ve had enough of that right now and there are plenty of good articles on how to make MT work (for example, start here); and I have work to do on my topic of writer’s block.
One thing I learned the hard way and didn’t find documented anywhere else. For my sins, I’m running Windows here at basecamp (I’d prefer Linux for the usual ideological and practical reasons, but this laptop seems to be optimized for the other thing). So a few weeks ago I’d been editing some files in MSPaint. Now, Paint creates filenames with capitalized extensions, goodness knows why anyone thought THAT was a good idea, and it led to inconsistencies on my web pages. But I outsmarted it, recovering geek that I am: I configured my FTP program to force lower-case filenames.
And weeks later, guess what that did to the Movable Type program files. It took me a couple days to figure that one out.
That’s the main thing I have to share. My experience of installing on the servers at Hostica was (1) I eventually installed MT in the cgi-bin and in a static directory; the other method of installing it all in one MT directory didn’t work for me, and my guess is that once you tell the server that a directory contains cgi files, it executes everything in there just the same as it would in the cgi-bin and (2) I have several web domains under the same account at Hostica but my static path is /mt_static/ not /todayiwrite.com/static/ or any of the other things I tried.
And now, let’s talk about writer’s block.
Published on March 19, 2005 at 10:54 pm. Linking to this article? Thank you! The permanent address is http://www.todayiwrite.com/journal/installing-movable-type.html
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