AlanBarber.Org
Wednesday, April 21, 2004
MovableType 3.0 Beta
I got an email today welcoming me to the Moveable Type 3.0 Beta test. When I saw the signup form a few days ago I figured I'd apply just for the giggles.I'm not really sure I want to upgrade this site to beta software. I just don't like the idea that I might wake up one morning and find everything is lost becuase of some bug. Plus ontop of that I've done a lot of work configuring and setting up background stuff for this site. From the front end it just looks like another MovableType weblog but on the backend I have a very complex configuration. Besides the major problem that mt-blacklist (a comment spam blocker) doesn't work with MT 3.0 I have a nightly backup script.
Every night I run a cron job that does several things:
1) closes all comments older than 14 days (execpt for those in the Tips and Tricks category)
2) Does a complete rebuild of the weblog (so the newly closed comment pages get updated)
3) targzips the entire archive directory
4) creates an export file of the blog (using the export blog trick found here: http://www.virtualvenus.org/archives/0309/create_an_export_blog.php )
5) targzips the export file
6) creates a dump of the mysql database
7) targzips the dump file
8) cleans up old files/etc
Then, I have my personal computer setup to auto-download the export and mysql dump files every morning. The backed-up archive directory gets downloaded every monday.
Most people would call this overkill to the extreme but for me I don't like to take chances. I've put in almost an entire year on this weblog so I'd hate to loose even a single days post.
So I think I'll hold off on upgrading this site for the time being. What I'll do is install MT 3.0 beta onto my freebsd test server and play around with it. I'll work on getting my nightly cycle to work with this new version. If I can get that working and after they release another beta or two and I'm sure it's safe then I'll upgrade this site.
There are suppose to be many new features that make MT 3.0 a lot better than 2.x that we all use now. I guess I'll just have to see.
on 04/21/2004 at 10:55 AM