Sorry for the lack of posts over the last few days. I’ve been occupied with a small (large?) issue that I (accidentally) noticed and which seems to have occurred during the period back in October when I moved and upgraded the site to Movable Type 3.1.

During the process of the move and upgrade, I cleaned up the post IDs (kind of accidentally actually) and during one of the import processes, the actual entries for the blog got a bit messed up. In the body/summary fields, certain words somehow ended up capitalized wherever they appeared. Not coincidentally these words were all special reserved keywords in MySQL — such as DISTINCT, SELECT, DELETE, CHECK, FROM, UPDATE, etc.

I’m not sure how this happened and it’s been a real nuisance to fix, but it did provide me with an opportunity to update the archives to all use the Markdown with SmartyPants text formatting plug-ins along with cleaning up some of the less than semantically correct HTML throughout.

Overall things are generally better now, allowing me to get back to the next big feature (and the last) that will likely make an appearance after this weekend or early next week given my current holiday schedule; leaving me time to finish the design and architecture phase of a long-overdue redesign. This will also coincide with the even longer overdue launch of the Wishingline Design Studio, Inc. site.

I’ve said it before, but the right dose of inspiration hit and I’m on a bit of a roll with things so far. Hopefully I can keep up the pace for as long as I need to get it done.

Anyway, back to MT… The lesson here is: be very careful when you import or export your entries. I don’t know which method is better — using a MySQL dump or the built-in Movable Type export/import functions. One of those two produced the problem I ran into and I’m debating testing with a local MT install to figure out which one. If I do, I will post the results here.

Update

It appears that Movable Type was able to export/import the entries cleanly and also did not exhibit the problems I encountered with phpMyAdmin did.