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August 08, 2004
We can rebuild him...better, stronger, faster
Well that sucked. After a massive, twelve hour server outage at my web host, I awoke to find that heyblog was hosed. Best I could tell, all the Berkeley DB files had gotten corrupted. MovableType had no idea about any comment entry on any of my weblogs had ever received, activity logs were stuck on empty, and I couldn't create new posts. Bad deal.
So I had to rebuild from scratch. Sadly, because I was (stupidly) using the "old-style archive links" format, where archived MT entries get a permanent URL based on an id number (like this one) re-importing my backed up entries wouldn't work: they'd be reassigned new ID numbers, and every post I had would suddenly get a new URL.
Here's what I decided: the Berlin Guide has (as far as I know) very few incoming links to content pages, but its site search is used a lot. By reimporting these entries, I could be sure they'd be indexed by my site's search engine. I also cleaned up the directory strcture a bit, and future-proofed the URLs a bit. I did lose the existing comments on the Berlin Guide pages, but that's ok; there were very few of any value.
For the heyblog, there are more than a few pages that Google considers meaningful, so I didn't want to break any existing URLs. I also knew that the site search on this weblog is rarely used. I also wanted to keep the few existing comments that have been added to old pages.
My best choice seemed to be to abandon those old entries from MovableType and start again. (I did reimport the two entries so far this month.) This also gave me the chance to start using better URLs: categories are in directories (like /archives/books), monthly archives appear as a calendar view (from diveintomark), and posts now have URLs based on titles.
It's not so bad. I'll have to go back and remove the comments forms from old entries, since they won't submit to anything meaningful. And my old entries are pretty much locked into fixed HTML, although they at least share the sitewide stylesheet.
Posted by Andrew at August 8, 2004 07:59 PM