Weblog failure woes

Argggghhhh was a vague approximation of the thought going through my brain earlier today. We had some problems on the server where MovableType serves as the CMS that runs the web sites for the classes I teach. When I tried to add a new post for an assignment, it just gave me a series of errors in the scripts. I can only assume this means that the script files were corrupted, or even worse that the data files have become corrupted! In the former case, a reinstall will probably fix the problem. In the latter case, I can only hope there is a good set of all my work on the backup.

I’m going to assume for now that the former — that is, corruption of the script files — is the cause. This leads me to the question of whether to reinstall MovableType, or just move on to another CMS. One of the current limitiations with our current server is the lack of any databases other than file based databases like DBM. I think that a server upgrade is long overdue anyway, and this might be a good justification for one. Perhaps its time to look at a heavy duty solution like Drupal and move beyond the blog paradigm to my course management.

Of course, there is the possiblity that my data has been irrevocably pooched … but I think I’ll choose to ignore that possibility for now.