Thu, July 7, 2005
Have unremarkable arcane programming skills, Will travel—12:14 PM
Last night I was a guest at the home of Jeff and Stacey Tidball, paying a house call in the role of Dr. Database. Recently, Jeff moved his eponymous website to a new web host, and the re-installation of MovableType created some filename headaches. Fortunately, the original prescription worked quite well – in less than two hours, we were able to crawl through the old entries in an HTML archive backup, store their (old) MovableType IDs in a database table, then loop through that table and associate (new) MovableType IDs by matching titles and dates against MovableType's database. (And that includes time for backing up old archives, several failed attempts at configuring Cedant's public-key encryption service to grant us SSH access, and the discovery that phpMyAdmin is another on the list of web apps broken by the latest release of Safari.) Then we installed a small, customized .htaccess file, which configures Apache's mod_rewrite to parse incoming old URLs and hand them off to a PHP script which uses them to fetch the appropriate URL from the MovableType database using our aforementioned associative table.
I may never deliver a baby in a subway, but it's fun when the essentially meaningless skills I've managed to acquire come in handy. Thanks to me, the following link works like a charm.
http://www.jefftidball.com/mt-archives/000127.html
