I've had nothing but trouble since upgrading Movable Type to 2.661. At the time I didn't even want to upgrade, but my webhost was having a problem with their sendmail module and insisted I try upgrading MT as a fix. Instead I ended up with multiple ping and rebuild problems.

Up until recently most of the problems were on pinging. I would rebuild an entry and start to ping, and it would time out and go 404 on me. I played around with trying to figure out the cause and eventually chalked it up to the pingees being unresponsive. That is, my server was pinging out but the remote server (ie: blo.gs, blogrolling) were timing out.

I've also gotten errors on rebuilding the Category archives. I've pretty much stopped putting posts into categories because of the rebuild errors. I cannot make it through a total Category rebuild without timing out, although all the other rebuilds are fine (individual and monthly). The category file sizes are approaching the 300-500k range so I figured maybe it was too much to handle. But I'm not entirely sure.

Today, I started getting timeouts on rebuilding, and I never even reach the ping stage. The main index does seem to rebuild, but the PDA version, XML version, and other indexes come up empty. But the odd thing is that mt.cgi times out even when rebuilding just one index file. If I try to rebuild the main index, or the PDA index it times out just the same. Also I noticed that the MT popup windows are a bit slow, my webmail is a bit slow, everything is slow. (UPDATE: Now that I bitch about it, this particular problem seems to have gone away.)

I've tried increasing the timeout variable, and not creating temp files. But none of that has worked. I might try downgrading MT from 2.661 to 2.64 where everything was running smoothly. I could also upgrade to version 3, but that might just make things worse. Then again, the site is approaching 4000 entries and 200 MB in size. I'm seriously tempted to tear the whole thing down and rebuild from scratch, but I don't really want to lose the archives. I could do a bulk import to restore the old posts, but then I would probably be back in the same boat I'm in now.

I'm also thinking of redesigning the site to make it more viewer friendly. I'm a bit tired of the jabs and criticism about the color scheme so it may be time for a change. It doesn't bother me much but I have gotten more than a few complaints. Then again I'm not the most creative person in the world and it could end up being much worse. Also, I don't want to turn into one of these guys that keeps changing the look and feel around every other week. The site should have a familiar look to it that doesn't change much over time. Hell, when I went from manual updates to Blogger to Movable Type, and from tables to CSS the look and feel hardly changed at all. In fact, the theme of the site has looked pretty much the same for the last 4 or 5 years. Oh, it's evolved slightly. I've added trackback, commenting, searching. I changed the lettering at the top to a graphic and moved from monthly to individual archives. But the basic look and feel has stayed the same. When you load the page it still screams "Ravenwood's Universe" I don't want people to come here and think they mistyped the address.

Whatever happens, it's going to have to wait a little while longer. Right now, my laptop is in the shop so I've been working off my old network server. It's good enough for posting articles, but it doesn't have photoshop installed or even MS Office. No, I'll have to wait until the laptop comes back before I try to tackle any of this.

But if I ever get over my procrastination, changes are a comin'.