I spent the last couple of days upgrading my website’s database from mysql 4 to 5 and playing around with Movable Type 3.35. Anyone remotely interested who’s been reading this journal for the almost 4 years it’s been in existence will probaly know that MT is the blogging software that powers 99% of this website. I’ve been using version 2.661 since day one, and didn’t follow the upgrade path when Six Apart released MT3 because they started charging for it. Now that they’ve gone back to no fees for personal user; and having just released MT4 beta, I think it’s high time I upgraded.

I partially upgraded to MT3.35. I will wait till MT4 becomes more stable, or the GPL version is released (supposedly Q307). In any case I want to get used to the new backend, and to watch for any problems for a week or so.

What does it mean for the readers? Not. A. Thing. What you see in your browser is no different to 2 days ago. But there is a big difference for me, when I write these entries — the look is different, I have tags now, I can do sub-categories, I know my website is safer from spam, and good stuff like that.

The only possible issue is that permalinks have changed, but that only affects anyone who’s linked to an entry which … I doubt there are any. The changes are to the naming convention and the doing away of truncation. So before, there may be a permalink like:

individual entry: http://invisiblecompany.com/archives/my_inner_science_ge/0001747invisibly_new.php
category archive: http://invisiblecompany.com/my_inner_science_ge/index.php

we now have:

individual entry: http://invisiblecompany.com/archives/2007/08/21/invisibly_new.php
category archive: http://invisiblecompany.com/my_inner_science_geek/index.php

There’s more to do in the next few months, if I keep at it. Next steps:

1. Merge both writing sections [ETA23.08: done]
2. Redo gallery — flickr is a better place for my photos, there are a few plug-ins and software that will display flickr sets as a gallery on websites
3. Think about what I want to do with Delicacies [ETZ23.08: deleted]
4. Add recipes section
5. Add tags for all entries (!!!! that’s over 1,000 entries for the entire site)
6. Delete unused weblogs [ETA23.08: done]
7. Site redesign — this design is getting old, I don’t want to look like a 2002 website, I need web 2.0 look