Upgrading Movable Type

Something has gone mildy wrong with my Movable Type installation. For the past few weeks, I’ve apparently been causing MT to do core dumps fairly regularly, to the point where I had built up around 2 gigs of these error files on my server space. I’ve been composing tonight’s regularly scheduled update, but I got to a point where I can’t seem to save my changes anymore. I keep getting Internal Server Errors. I noticed a new version of MT is available, so I figured it’s about time for an upgrade. See you on the other side.

Update: Upgrade is complete. I hope. I suppose I’ll find out soon if there are any unexpected consequences (there often are).

Again Update: As of yet, the upgrade doesn’t seem to have broken anything, but if you run into any issues, feel free to email me (or post a comment, as that seems to work fine).

Incidentally, the upgrade didn’t seem to fix the problem I was having with the Neal Stephenson post (which I did eventually get working). Once I looked at the core dump files, I noticed something odd – there was a bunch of HTML in the file, and it was all code from Amazon’s pages. It turns out that MT was choking on my post because I had linked each Stephenson novel to Amazon. Once I removed those links, all was well in MT-land. This, of course, makes absolutely no sense. The only thing I can think of is that that many Amazon links was setting off some sort of Spam filter (in either MT or my hosting service), but that seems unlikely. Regardless, once I figured out the Amazon problem, I was able to get the post up in relatively short order.

For reference, if you’re seeing a lot of core dump files in your MT directory, you might want to check out this thread in the MT community. Apparently this has been an issue for quite some time and it has something to do with MT’s memory usage. Or perhaps a couple of other factors. Someone else there had an isssue with links tripping up their hosts’ spam filter, so perhaps that’s what was causing my problem…