Thank the Gods!

I just upgraded to MovableType 4.

It didn't go smoothly…

But if you can see this, then the blog is still kicking.

And I am breathing deep, deep sighs of relief.

Skip the rest of this post if you're not interested in the minutia.

Sweet mother of fuck was I scared the whole damned thing was gone.

How was I supposed to know how badly it could go? I had performed major and minor upgrades in exactly the same fashion in the past. When I found the new version of MT was available I quickly downloaded it, then uploaded new version over the old. All that remained was to log in to commence the database upgrade.

But there was no logging in. Only an error message.

And I had begun the upgrade without first doing the most important thing I could have done: a backup.

Yeah. I know.

I nearly gave up. It took me days to see possible avenues of reconstruction. I pulled down a copy of my database just in case… I don't know. Maybe I could start over and upload the data some way?

Then I started deleting crap so that I could try again by uploading the new blog software cleanly--no residue from the old, you know? But I ended up over-writing my index.html so that the front page was gone. Just a generic MT homepage placeholder remained.

After some digging, I managed to find a copy of it. I had to look in the caches of many web browsers. After uploading it, at least the site *looked* intact. Even if it was still broken.

It really sucked to be unable to log in. I wanted to say at least that I was down and would be back soon. If it had gone much longer, I would have resorted to editing the front page manually.

I finished the clean upload. I had first deleted the contents of the static files folder, then basically everything but the index file and the configuration file from the root directory.

That worked. Yesterday, after days, I was finally able to log in to my blog.

Then I wrote the first draft of this entry and...

There were errors my the templates. Old template tags that are no longer supported. The software would save new entries but it wouldn't publish them.

Tonight I was able to eradicate those old tags. And I finally published this entry.

There are still some fixes and kinks to work out. But I am alive.

I'm alive I tell you.