All clear

Wow, was THAT a hassle. We are now running MovableType, version π, but it wasn't without its difficulties. Did all the due diligence ahead of time, exporting our entries in case anything catastrophic happened, etc. Everything installed and upgraded just fine - cgi scripts ran properly and gave all of the right "success!" messages. Then I tried to log in.

Invalid user.

D'oh!

Re-enter login/password, same error. Re-re-enter login/password, same error.

Shit.

"Forgot your password?" Why, yes I have. Enter my username, enter the password hint...

No such author with name 'dave'"

(*&^@#$#(*$&^!!

Followed by some running around the room, frantic Googlesearching. Several results yield a potential fix - I need to update my databases - but that only seems to have to do with changing hosts or servers. I run it anyway since it's the only thing I can find...no dice. In the meantime we're in the middle of watching the tensest episode of 24 ever (one of the girls in our dorm walked in during the traffic stop scene, and we barely even acknowledged her, but she still sat down and watched the rest of the show with us) and I'm relegated to picking up the laptop during commercial breaks and frantically searching for a solution.

Mrs. Dave notices my furrowed brow, shortness of breath and panicked typing, asks me what's wrong, and I spare her the gory details. Finally, I stumble upon MT-Medic, a plugin that basically lets me hack into our MovableType installation and reset passwords (no, you can't have them) so we can get back in. Crisis averted.

Then this morning, I realize that somehow all of our comments have disappeared from the site. Not from the actual blog, but from the pages that are displayed. Somehow in the upgrade from 2.64 to π, and in the upgrade from MT-Blacklist 1.x to 2.x, a new feature was introduced that allows us to "moderate" any comments that are made. It's pretty cool, actually, since most of the comment spam is made on older entries, so we can just delete them and de-spam them out of hand rather than having to go root them out, while allowing legit comments on old entries to be posted. But this upgrade set ALL comments to "pending", so none of them displayed on the site, and EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM had to be approved individually. I did some more searching for a magic plugin that would just approve them all in one fell swoop, but nothing turned up. So my afternoon was spent becoming better-acquainted with my mouse... click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click click

It's not bad when your blog has 140 comments, but some of us are more popular than others. SIX HUNDRED is a lot of clicks, and some of those didn't even take the first time. I'm surprised I didn't wake up with carpal tunnel.