I’m not sure if anyone noticed this, but lithostech.com is using a drastically different theme. It’s just a canned theme like the old one because I’m not a designer and also can’t afford one. That’s not the only difference though. I’ve also switched from Drupal to Wordpress. Mainly, I made the switch because we’re considering moving to Wordpress from Movable Type at work and I wanted to get a feel for how it works.
Movable Type 4.2 introduced (among other things) built-in pagination. When you have a set of entries published to a dynamic index, you can auto-paginate them with some magical tags and it works wonderfully. That is, it works unless you wanted to use Movable Type’s built-in caching system for dynamic content. Movable Type’s cache entries are unique to a given relative URL excluding the request parameters. In the case of pagination, request parameters make all the difference on what should be cached. If you’re not following, this means that the following URLs are identical as far as the MT cache is concerned:
/
/?limit=10&offset=10
/?whatever_its_all_the_same_to=MT
Lately, I’ve been in
the business of migrating between hosting providers. We’re moving away
from the classic web host CentOS. The reason that CentOS became the web
host OS of choice in the middle of the decade still eludes. I just
imagine a some RHEL fan club being told to implement a linux web host
solution with no budget and CentOS was the fruit of that effort. Our new
host is of the new ultra-trendy VPS type. We chose slicehost on some
recommendations from friends. I host my own blog and some other stuff
on a VPS at vpslink.com. I fired it up with Intrepid Ibex (of course)
and started migrating stuff over the Ubuntu way.
That’s all well and good, but the reason I’m writing this is because I found a great way to move our largest system which is a family of blogs related to fresnobeehive.com. We’d been using movable type to publish blogs since version 2.x, and the new systems are running 4.x. Back then, the only publishing option was to physically build every page for the entire system ahead of time. That system works great when you have only a few hundred entries, but when you start getting into the 10s of thousands of entries, static publishing begins to break down a little. It takes most of a day to publish the entire site if you make a global template change. Combine this with the fact that we’re attempting to redesign the blogs during the move, and we’ve got a lot to juggle.