Movable Type Malfing
Everyone, please be patient while Movable Type gets its stuff together. Recently, upgrades to perl and mysql have been upgraded on web hosts all around, and it appears that the new versions may not be compatible with Movable Type, this blog’s operating software. This means that certain events on this blog will not function properly, such as posting to comments. If you try, you may get a “500 – Internal Server Error” message. However, your comment will have been saved–it’s just that the Movable Type script that’s now incompatible with perl can’t go on to rebuild the post or give you any other message. It is also possible that this is worse with TypeKey than with unregistered commenters, at least for the time being. The malfunction also makes it harder–though not impossible, as you can tell–to post new entries for the blog.
I am trying to see if I can get my web host to downgrade the elements that are causing the problem, so the site can go back to the way it was before–but I have the feeling that the elements are server-wide and so cannot be changed just for me. Otherwise, I’ll have to just wait for Six Apart to fix the problem on their end and issue a patch or an upgrade (3.2 is due out soon).
So please be patient, and I’ll get things back to running smoothly again as soon as I can.
Update (July 4): my web host has downgraded at least part of the new software that might be causing the problems–but I’m still experiencing errors. There might be fewer errors than before, it’s hard to say. Still looking for a way out of this mess.
What is trackball?
What? I don’t mention a trackball here. Why do you ask?
There was a new button on the screen called Trackball next to the Comment button. What does the 2nd do?
That’s “TrackBack,” not “TrackBall” (trackball is a kind of mouse with the rolling ball on top instead of underneath).
TrackBack is a way for other sites to indicate that they have referenced this particular blog post in their own blog. If you click the button, it is supposed to show references and links to the referring articles.
However, Trackbacks are not as common as they were before because they have become fodder for spammers; that’s why I had them turned off for a while. But now that I have more effective spam filters for trackback spam, I’ve turned them back on.
Luis, I’m getting those 500 errors too!! Man what a pain.
Roy:
Are they consistent, or do they happen most but not all of the time? Do they occur with comments, or only when a save-and-rebuild of an entry? Any info we can pool might eventually help somehow. In the meantime, keep an eye out here, and I’ll tell of any progress with the problem.
I hit trackback and did not see any links.
How does the other site get listed?
How does the trackback help the reader?
he link you see is just the link to the listing page. It does not indicate the existence of any trackbacks. They come relatively rarely to this site, so most of the links will reveal no trackbacks. A lot of people don’t even do them anymore because of the spam problem.
I first experienced them last night as I was trying to post something. I kept getting those internal 500 errors. It seems like it is saving to DB fine but the cgi is throwing an error. I checked the logs and it looks like a problem with updating the archive file itself. I could rebuild the main index page to see the changes fine but could not save the entry properly.
Also, I removed a chunk of javascript which MT generates to popup images and it saved no problems but when I put it back it threw the error again. I even copied and pastes code that worked twice and it caused the error so it does not seem like I had any error in the code.
Strange. Beyond that I haven’t had much time to trouble shoot it.
Hope this helps..