.::output >> /dev/null::.

Update: Seems that fastCGI is not as stable as I had hoped it would be. Sometimes the damn thing just crashes and has to restart itself. I am sure there is a non-obvious simple solution to this (probably by adding some line to http.conf or dispatch.fcgi). The good news is that if there is an error, just reload the page and fastcgi will kick back in with a new instance of itself. The bad news: this is really a pain.

By following the instructions here I managed to get my typo web blog running on Apache-fcgi. I must say the speed improvements are really noticeable even though it required some rather weird instructions such as not installing mod_ruby or mod_sql.

Now the speed is really comparable to that of MovableType. Even the admin pages load faster. And Marsedit does not suffer from any lag whenever I post a new article. The only way that this could be faster would be to have lighttpd with fcgi installed. When the windows version of that comes out, you can bet that I will be installing it.

And remove MovableType from my server. It was a real pain having to install it on windows on the first place. Not to mention all those stupid Perl modules that I had to obtain. Anyway, the pain is over now.

But for safety, I am going to retain the .sql files as well as the mt.cgi file that is exported directly from MovableType. That being said, I am still pretty happy with MovableType has to offer. It is a great blogging system. It definitely beats blosxom. Blosxom was my first blogging system and it did a rather good job at that. Problem is, there is very little support for it. And hardly anything new is being done to it.

Today is the day that I moved my blog from MovableType to typo. Yeah! No more messy perl files to deal with. And with typo 2.0, I gain the Kubrick template as well. So that saves me some time as well.

Right now it is running on Apache2 with cgi only. Now, as most of you have heard, this is not the way to be fast. However, as pointed out in Agile Web Development with Rails trying to get Apache and FastCGI to work together is no simple task. In fact, I dabbled with it for the past 3 hours with no success. Moreover, I could not even install the fcgi gem!

So, right now, the site seems to be really sluggish. There should be something else that can be configured to make this faster. Right now, it seems that typo is fetching all 70+ articles each time we reload the page. At least, I think so. I am most probably wrong. And I hope I am.

Anyway, I need to spend some time reading the source code and tweaking things. Right now, I am running the default out of the box configuration. Definitely needs some tweaking.

However, this process has been fun and I am sure I will get better at handling the idiosyncrasies of Apache and FastCGI.

Ah, the agony. I just stumbled across Typo which is a sweet weblog system written with Ruby on Rails! That means that I can actually fiddle with it and that I already understand more than 80% of what is going on. This beats MovableType in a way since MovableType is written in Perl and I am not confident in that language. Again, it gives me time to eat my own dog food since I am a big fan of Ruby on Rails.

And of course, this provides the excellent opportunity to follow through using the Agile Web Development with Rails book that I bought but have not fully utilized. Ah, the temptation. The only thing that is holding me back is the lack of templates for Typo. However, that can be viewed as some of motivation as well since now I can no longer rely on someone else's template.

Oh, did I mention that someone wrote a script that will migrate my MovableType entries over to Typo? Excellent

Plans to install the kubrick template for MovableType is still not happening. The last time I did this, I used the steps highlighted here but the link has been done for some time. The author says that the website will be up soon, sometime.

I destroyed my computer's system files last night while trying to be heroic and installed the OS X 10.4.2 update without waiting for it to show up on software update. Now that I think of it, there can be a few reasons why the installation failed miserably. Here are my theories:

• Intego's virus barrier did something to screw with the installation.
• I actually downloaded the wrong package to install! It could have even been the one for OS X Server!
• I tried doing what rixstep told me to do to secure the sudo command.
• My bootleg version of Tiger finally revealed its true stripes. I bought Tiger but I managed to procure a bootleg version of it before mine arrived. So thinking that I have a license for it, I might as well take the plunge earlier. Hmmm, bad idea.
• Some butterfly in Tokyo flapped its wings and caused some imbalance in the amount of bad luck in the world. Thus, Murphy's Law struck harder than expected.

But the more important thing is that I managed to salvage what I can from my previous weblog. Of course, that is not much since all the pictures are now missing. And some of the posts are also missing. The ones that I managed to restore so far are from an exported file done through movable type itself.

The most important thing is that I have come to appreciate the usefulness of syncing with .mac. Because of that, I was able to get a new installation of OS X Tiger up and running within an hour with all the bare minimums. It took me about 3 more hours to install programs that I think I might need. However, this time around, I am more selective of what programs I actually install. Additionally, this fanstastic program called PodWorks saved my iTunes library file for me by transferring the songs back from the iPod will all the latest ratings and play dates. Wonderful. Well worth its $ 8 price tag. Incidentally, rixstep offers some command line method for doing it. Unfortunately, the instructions were not explained clearly. And my first trial with it caused my music folder to be invisible to the finder. I really have to be careful with what rixstep says.

Finally, my greatest worry now is how secure this blog is going to be on windows. I have this feeling that it is not at all.

Here are my plans for the next few days:

• Restore posts from the .sql file that I managed to salvage.
• Remove all links to the broken images.
• Change the site to use php and generate dynamic archived pages instead of static ones.
• Change the template to kubrick, again.
• An article on how I painfully got movable type to work on windows! Yeah!

Did some hasty job of changing the template once I realized that it is no longer winter. Expect a better looking one once I have more time on my hands.

/tmp has been updated to use the kubrick template. Main instructions to convert kubrick from Wordpress to MovableType comes from Jose Salazar.com. However, his instructions were not too complete and left some problems. I will list them in the next paragraph. But first, take a look at it: /tmp.

• There were only templates for some of the pages. Jose provided files for the main page and individual entries. So I was left to configure the rest of the pages on my own. For a large site such as this there are a lot more pages to change since it involves redefining the entire CSS and page template.
• His use of <? //Header ?> tags confused the php parser and cause the page not to display. It took some time to realize this. This would not be a problem if we are using .html extensions for the entries. Replacing those <? and > tags with <!-- and > rid me of the problem.
• There was no template for the search page. Fortunately, there were instructions on how to do this on the MovableType documentation: public search. There were more changes that had to be made because the search template resides under a .cgi file so any .php that might reside in Jose's original code had to be parsed.
• There were a lot of uncleaned code in the files that Jose provided. It will take me some time to clean them up.

Other than those quirks, the site looks fresher. I will change the default blue background to something more interesting in the future. However, I do not plan to change the template for this page unless I have a lot of time on my hands. Instead, I will continue to rely on the styles from movablestyle.com.

but she's a girl... » Why WordPress?: "Movabletype (MT) and WordPress (WP) have a lot of similarities (indeed, many of the new features I’ve included in my new design could have been accomplished with MT), but one fundamental difference: MT produces static web pages, and WP produces dynamic ones. This difference is an important one; every time the content of the page needs to change in a static system (which can happen quite frequently with a weblog with comments, trackbacks and so on), the entire page needs to be rebuilt. If you have monthly and category archives, those pages need to be rebuilt too. Rebuilding is pretty speedy when you have a small number of posts, but it gets slower as time goes on and you accumulate more content. However, with a dynamic system, the changes are made the instant someone reloads the page."

This puts a new perspective on things and I would like to see how it goes with WordPress. I might just go and experiment with it when I am free. So far, I can attest that using MovableType is certainly more slick than using bloxsom. After all, I am someone who is easily taken in by a nice user interface.

Updated: I just notice that this version of movable types supports dynamic and static hosting as mentioned on the main page of movabletype.org. This is worth investigating because my current configuration seems to be limited to static as I was following the instructions on maczealots.com

Updated: My blog has now been configured to do dynamic publishing for the archived pages.

mt31 - Guide to the New Features in Movable Type 3.1: "The most prominent new feature in Movable Type 3.1 is the dynamic page functionality, allowing you to combine static page generation with dynamic pages on a per-template basis. This allows you to balance the publishing and traffic for your weblog, and gives you the best of both worlds: you can turn on static page generation for frequently-requested pages like your site index and feeds, and use dynamic pages for your monthly, individual, and other archive pages. This completely eliminates the need to manually rebuild your files; when you update the design of your archive templates, for example, the design of your site will immediately be updated without requiring you to rebuild."

Here are the steps necessary to do it under OS X 10.3. I figured this out after wasting time trying to debug the whole thing.

I am sure not all the steps are necessary but I have only done it in this order:


1. I converted all my pages to .php instead of html because in the future I will be using .php. http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/php/ is a good place to get the installer. Then follow the steps at http://www.elise.com/mt/archives/000451html_or_php.php
2. The next thing I did was to go into /etc/httpd/httpd.conf to enable .htaccess. You can find the details on google. Make sure you do sudo apachectl restart as well for the changes to take effect.
3. Next you need to install the php modules that this tutorial left out. When you download the MovableType package and untarred it, there is a folder called php inside. Drag this folder into /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables Then in that same directory do sudo 755 php
4. With steps 2 and 3 taken care of, you can follow the steps at the official MovableType site: http://www.movabletype.org/docs/mt31.html#dynamic%20pages

This is just a random picture that my girl friend took. I am just testing the installation of Image::Magick on this server.