Well, after a month-long hiatus, I’m back on the blog grid. A couple people have pointed out that Cogito recently flooded the aggregators and planets out there with a whole lot of old entries; I apologize, but I don’t think I could’ve helped it.

On top of that, many have pointed out over the past several weeks that my domain had become nothing but an alias for the GEECS home page. While it was an inconvenience, I couldn’t be happier about it; I’m glad that the GEECS (a student group at Northfield Mount Hermon) have finally regained enough presence to set up a server and take ownership of their domain name. When I graduated from NMH, the GEECS had been emaciated by a combination of administrative antagonism and student apathy. So it’s always great to see them back in action.

Anyways, when they switched DNS, they didn’t switch my CNAME. No big deal. A few weeks later (and a couple panicked emails), I got my domain back.

(What I still don’t have back is cogito.cc, which GoDaddy has shut down for being associated with an active phisher. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t my server, it was a subdomain registered through the same dynamic DNS service. They want $200, I’m not paying, and I’m very angry, but I’ll tell that story in a later post.)

Once I got my domain back, I realized that my Movabletype databases were all screwed up. It turns out I just needed to upgrade them (which in Debian is db4.2_upgrade, not db_upgrade as I’d been taught to expect), but before I figured that out, I ended up upgrading to MovableType 3.0. This, in turn, wiped out half of my templates (and munged the other half that it didn’t just overwrite), so I followed the upgrade with a couple hours of searching through my browser cache, cut-and-pasting the HTML, and sticking MovableType tags back in. (I can hear you all clamoring to switch to Wordpress, and maybe one day, but for now I like not having to set up a SQL database on my Linode.)

So the short version of a long story is that the MovableType upgrade spammed the planets, it wasn’t intentional, and I still dislike BerkeleyDB. (Not as much as I dislike MySQL, though.) In the works are another site redesign, a new content management system for the static pages, and maybe even a better blogging engine.

But for now, lunch.