Theoblogical

I haven’t been able to get MT to work since I left it for WordPress 2 years ago.  I’ve been continuing to upgrade and try the installs with all my old posts that I had when I left it.  MT 4.1 started working for a few days,  but now all of a sudden when I try to publish anything…posts, templates,  anything,.  I get an error box that says “An error occurred,  with a red exclamation point,  but no description of the error.  The area next to the red exclamation point is blank.  What the heck?  This is horrible.  I was trying a solution for remapping the post URLs from my old archives/00001.html   to the new archives/post-title-like-this.html.  But when I tried uploading the template,  I got the dumb useless error.

The logs don’t tell me what the error was either. 

I have ,  ever since porting my blog over to WordPress,  been playing with the subsequent versions of Movable Type.  Version 4.1 seems to have fixed a lot of things,  but I cannot figure out how to get my archive links fixed.  The system knows all of the correct links internally for the sidebars and permalinks and archive or index pages,  but the posts which link to to other internal posts all still have the “OLD” version archive link (this format: http://theoblogical.org/movtyp/archives/004746.html).  For the sake of my external links (like from my present WordPress blog,  which has all those links to old MT posts,  I want to change back to the old style. I keep finding things about going and changing the link format under some preference,  but I have searched in vain to find the place in MT4 where this can be done.  

(Update: found the place at mt.cgi?__mode=view&_type=template&id=284&blog_id=1,  but amusure of what the format should be to replace yyyy/mm/entry-basename.html. the url above to 00476.html is changed in my present set up to /archives/2006/03/the-struggle.html )

Anybody help?

MT 4 has failed several tests.  This is why I moved off the platform and onto WordPress in the first place.

1. SLOW SLOW SLOW when you have thousands of posts like I do.  The template republishing is the same reason why I moved from Radio Userland.

2. The Dynamic publishing is too difficult for a non-PERL person like me.  I had hoped for this to solve my MT problems last year, but no go.  The switch to Dynamic publishing just didn’t work, and there were no helps out there that I could find.

3. I just tied to login using Windows Live Writer,  and boom….error.  Again,  MT still can’t do it for me.  I still want to get my posts into Community Server. The BlogML imports have yet to work.  Some malformation of my WordPress Export,  but I have yet to find a validator out there.  So,  it’s still WordPress for now.

I have a beef……over at Generous Orthodoxy Think Tank,  in this post (Scholarly Popularizers and Academic Activists) and its comments,  discussions like these,  without a way to “notify” participants who may well have an interest in the further contributions to a discussion in which they themselves have had interest,  are not given notice that something new has been added,  because there are no “comment RSS” or email subscription notification that new comments have been added.  I tried several times to offer additional food for thought into this discussion,  but noone has returned,  and I don’t think its due to people ignoring my questions.  It’s just that the original post has “slipped below the line” and no longer “in view”.  Think Tank is using TypePad,  a hosted version of Movable Type for their blog.  It is missing ,  as far as I know,  the WordPress (and some other blogs) feature of either comment RSS (so that people interested in a certain discussion can see when new comments are added) or email notification (where they can click a “send me email when new comments are added” link,  like Community Server and some other systems do). 

I think this is is not only a “technical issue”,  but a theological problem as well.  It flies in the face of the idea of “listening” to one another.  Like I said just a few lines back,  I do not see this as a matter of being ignored,  but the system’s shortcomings in this regard have made it inevitable.  I would suggest that perhaps Thinktank and perhaps other blog-based “theological dialogues” take this under advisement.  WordPress also has a “hosted” version ,  and Community Server does very well in such features.

I wish there was a way to link from , say,  my original post on my still reachable Movable Type blog (which is now archive of my present blog on WordPress, into which I have  imported all the prior MT posts …..but  to people who arrive at a particular blog post via the original Movable Type link,  I wish there was a way to link the comment area for that post over to the corresponding post in the WordPress blog.  The WordPress import mechanism receives a Movable Type export file,  and dumps all of the posts and its comments and trackbacks into a new WordPress post,  but the ID’s don’t match,  and so the only possible match would be on title (date would not work since I obviously often post more than once a day).

Since comments on MT broke and seem down for the duration,  I would not want to miss out on any comment that someone might want to make after reading the MT blog post.