April 9th, 2003:

Version 4.1.0 (alpha) of MySQL, the little database engine that could, has been released, and now it can do even more. The 4.1 tree introduces new features like subqueries, derived tables, and mulit-line queries. It also improves performance. This release is not for use in Production Environments, however, stick it on your development servers and help them test yet another great release of an amazing product. [via Keith Devens and Matt Croydon]

While browsing through the MovableType support forums, I ran across a post regarding MovableType’s slow response to just about anything — from here forward known as MovableType-itis. This slowness results in posts that never finishish posting, trackbacks that never make it to their destination, and the same comment being posted 10 times because the comment poster doesn’t think the system is working. Since revjim.net suffers the same symptoms of MovableType-itis, I was very interested in the replies.

At the very end of the post, someone replied stating that changing all instances of <$MTInclude module="blah"$> to <MTInclude module="blah"> (removing the dollar signs) would speed the system up. The response to this reply was from an individual who clearly didn’t understand what was being said, and then there was nothing more.

I browsed through the MovableType documentation where every instance of the above tag was show with the dollar signs. However, just for fun, I decided to remove them.

I edited all my templates and, though I didn’t really time anything, posting entries, comments and trackbacks all seemed to occur faster than before. I went an extra step and rid all of my MovableType tags of their dollar signs. This seemed to make it even faster still.

Now, I’m not about to dig through the MovableType code base just to figure out why this would be true. I don’t really care. What matters is that, MovableType no longer times out when I post an entry, and it seems to be much snappier at doing what it’s supposed to do.

Maybe this isn’t an issue for everyone, but there are enough posts regarding it in the support forums to indicate that it certainly is a problem. Maybe the problem is exaggerated depending on the number of entries you have. I have over 2,000, currently — maybe that’s more than the average?

Regardless of whether it works or not, if you use MovableType and your site is suffering the symptoms of MovableType-itis it won’t hurt you to try. It certainly isn’t a solution, but at least it makes using MovableType a bit more bareable.

If you’d like to give it a shot, simply edit all of your MovableType templates. Everytime you see a tag that starts with <$MT and ends with $> get rid of the dollar signs.

If you have your template files kept in the file system to make them easier to edit, as I do, and you happen to have access to vim on your server, you can do it in one quick sweep. Here’s how:

• Log into your server.
• Use cd to navigate into the directory that holds your MovableType templates.
• Type vim and press enter.
• Enter the following keystrokes into vim: :args * */* */*/*.
• Then enter these keystrokes into vim: :argdo %s/<$MT\(.\{-}\)$>/<MT\1>/g | update.
• Finally, type the following into vim: :q!.
• That’s it.

If you try this, and it works, please let me know.

Yet another group of people are hacking away at the b2/cafelog code in order to add features and clean up code. This particular version is named WordPress. They don’t have any deliverables yet, but stay tuned. You can read their most recent update to get an idea of where they are headed. [via geek ramblings (man, is that URL ugly or what?)]

With all of these b2 hacks/forks in progress I am reminded of the *Nukes. While, in my opinion, a clean, usable *Nuke fork has never been created, I hope these guys can really turn bad code into something usable.

Yet another person is taking some action and rewriting b2, and it looks like it’s off to a good start. As best as I can tell it will support templated output (hopefully using something that truly separates layout logic from code logic like Smarty), Encrypted posts, SSL support, threaded comments, and a DB redesign. Hopefully, it’ll also include search-engine friendly URLs. [via phil ringnalda]