Greetings and Apologies

Welcome to the shambles! Especially, welcome to visitors who may have come here from having listened to David Weinberger talk about this page in his talk at the Library of Congress on CSPAN. It’s not usually hand-coded here; this Saturday, I ill-advisedly decided that I should upgrade my Moveable Type installation on my own, without any counsel — how hard could it be? Micah upgraded Seabury’s installation — so I proceeded to perform the upgrade flawlessly (so far as I could tell) until I went to log in.

It quickly became clear that I had done something very, very bad. “How bad?” Let’s put it this way: if you noticed the Internets running somewhat slower over the weekend, it was because the high-level maintenance talent that should have been speeding packets to their destinations was poring over my database trying to figure out what on earth I had done. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of dollars worth of person-hours are going into repairing the breach in the diigtal space-time continuum that my blunder, whatever it turns out to be, caused. That’s the one consolation, as a matter of fact; at least I didn’t do anything trivially stupid. I mucked it up royally.

So, anyway, I’ll try to get back to you as soon as we figure out what to do with the database. Don’t try permalinking to this, or commenting, or anything (that’s the silver lining — no comment spam for three days! Of course, we had to kill commenting, and updating, to eliminate it, but still. . .).

Oh, I was told to ask around to see if anyone has a handy script for scraping archives to reconstruct an MT database, or some other such panic-level utility. Or oil of healing for a database. Where’s Miracle Max when you need him?

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