Upgrading MySQL – and what about Movable Type?

We just switched the main servers available for faculty and staff accounts from AIX to Linux, so I spent most of the afternoon re-installing MySQL binaries. That went OK, after a few moments of panic when I installed an old version of my data from March (sorry if that messed up your RSS readers for … Continue reading “Upgrading MySQL – and what about Movable Type?”

We just switched the main servers available for faculty and staff accounts from AIX to Linux, so I spent most of the afternoon re-installing MySQL binaries. That went OK, after a few moments of panic when I installed an old version of my data from March (sorry if that messed up your RSS readers for this feed!).

Not that the MySQL upgrade is done, I notice that MT-Blacklist, my comment and trackback spam manager for this blog, isn’t working any longer. I’m not too worried about comment spam, as comments need to be authenticated with TypePad IDs, but I get a constant flow of trackback spam. It’s only a few a day, so I can certainly handle it manually for a short period of time, but that’s sort of a pain.

I’m on Movable Type 3.14. I notice that 3.2 has the anti-spam features built into the core product, but MT 4 is supposed to be out soon – It’s supposedly in its final beta release now.

So, should I:

– Install MT 3.2 now and worry about 3.4 later?
– Install the 3.4 beta now and hope it’s stable enough to not blow my blog away?
– Just live with what I’ve got now until 3.4 comes out in a production release?

Decisions, decisions – all opinions welcome here!

4 thoughts on “Upgrading MySQL – and what about Movable Type?”

  1. Supposedly MT4 will supposedly have tighter integration with Akismet, so that should make the spam problems easier to deal with. And OpenID support too, which means goodbye TypeKey. I had a chance to play with the live demo, and it seems like they’ve learned from WordPress.

    I haven’t installed the MT4 beta yet, though, since the beta isn’t ready from prime time yet, and the licensing stuff isn’t resolved. I got caught out last time when I upgraded to MT3 Beta and suddenly I was told to pay up or else.

    Take a look at WordPress 2.2 and TextPattern. Both have really improved in UX and stability the last year.

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  2. If I were you I’d back up my data and install MT4 beta and then save all posts manually in case of failure, given the apparent state of the beta it shouldn’t be a difficult upgrade from the beta to the final and it should be pretty stable.

    Spam is super annoying, if only there was a definitive solution that wasn’t too violent 🙂

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  3. If I were you I’d back up my data and install MT4 beta and then save all posts manually in case of failure, given the apparent state of the beta it shouldn’t be a difficult upgrade from the beta to the final and it should be pretty stable.

    Spam is super annoying, if only there was a definitive solution that wasn’t too violent 🙂

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  4. I’ll concur with xijio – back up your data, then install MT4 beta. I’m planning on doing the same after a post-purge at niherlas.com.

    WordPress is quite popular, yes – MT lost a lot of mindshare when it tried to go commercial. But WordPress’ default mode is pages that are dynamically generated each time you visit. MT does the heavy lifting in batch mode, and serves static pages. For a situation such as yours, where you’re already using shared processing on the UW server farm, static pages would seem to be better.

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