Yes, I’m still alive, and yes I’m still blogging.
It’s been a bit quiet for the past few days because I’ve been sorting out some server issues. Basically, my host ran out of memory on Friday morning, and I’ve been getting it upgraded and trying to sort out some of the memory use and performance issues since then. It’s nothing particularly huge, but it’s taken all of my non-work/non-gaming time. All the software work is now done, but there’s a server migration still to happen, that’ll come up when my hosting company (the excellent RimuHosting can sort out some trouble they’re having with broken Intel BIOSs. But since that’s almost entirely managed by them, it shouldn’t take any more time out of my blogging.
While I was at it, I installed a couple of plugins for Movable Type 4, which should give quite a bit more flexibility in how you sign in while commenting. Not that anyone ever does.
One of the new features in Movable Type 4 is native user registration. What that means to you is that you don’t need to go and sign up for a TypeKey ID to be a registered commenter here any more. Of course, if you do have a TypeKey account, you can still use it (and it might come in handy at other SixApart sites you visit,) but you shouldn’t have to have one.
Obviously, I haven’t tried it out yet, so if it doesn’t work for me, leave a comment (anonymously) on this topic, and I’ll look at why it might be broken.
I’ve just upgraded the site to the new, improved version of Movable Type (the blogging platform I use.) This should make improve the blog in the long run, but in the short term it basically just means that I’m back to using one of the default layouts. This will (maybe) change over time.
The only important thing that’s missing is the links to the feeds from the main page; the two afeeds (Atom and RSS) are both still there and working, but you can’t get to them unless you know they’re there.