Okay, that's it...

Posted on September 27, 2004 @ 17:45 in Sitestuff

I've had it with Perl and MovableType. For whatever esoteric reasons MT occasionally goes out of whack on my webhost's server. First the search function started behaving strangely, throwing errors for some search terms but not for others. That got better, but it never really went away. Then suddenly MT decided that it could no longer work with the NetPBM library for creating thumbnails of uploaded images. When my webhost installed ImageMagick this problem went away. Now, without any changes on my part whatsoever, MTBlacklist has decided something is wrong. It throws the beautiful error:

An error occurred: Byte order is not compatible at blib/lib/Storable.pm (autosplit into blib/lib/auto/Storable/thaw.al) line 363, at /sites/fragment.nl/www/cgi-bin/mt/lib/MT/PluginData.pm line 28

So, what happened? Did Storable.pm change itself from little endian to big endian overnight? I doubt it.

I asked my webhost a while back what could be cause these strange errors without any apparent changes from my or their side. He said Perl and Perl based programs sometimes go out of whack for no obvious reasons from a perfectly servicable state and occasionally return to that state as well. It's one of the reasons he said they themselves don't endorse Perl based applications.

So... what next? I've been playing with (the PHP based) WordPress for a while now and I think I'm going to switch over to the 1.3 alpha branch. Nothing like living dangerously :-) With a bit of effort that'll keep me going for a while, but eventually I think I'm going to switch the whole site over to a more fully fledged content management system, like maybe Xaraya or Drupal. At the moment Xaraya seems the more conceptually pleasing one to me and the template system looks like something I can wrap my head around.

Changes... pretty soon there are going to be more big changes in my life, but I'll write about those another time.

Comments and Trackbacks

  1. Good luck with your switch. :)

    Posted by Matt on September 27, 2004 @ 21:08

  2. Thanks Matt :) I'm going to take it slow, since MT is still running, so I'll make sure everything works behind the scenes so I can do a hopefully clean switch... yeah, I know... but a guy can dream ey?

    Posted by Frank on September 28, 2004 @ 20:22

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Comments and trackbacks have been closed on this site. My apologies.

Since MT-Blacklist inexplicably stopped working I had no other recourse than close comments and trackbacks to stop the spam. I've been meaning to correct this for quite a while, but life got in the way... in a good way I should add.