After pitching a fit with LunarPages, who finally apologized and agreed to restore the entire Movable Type installation, I spent an hour or so this morning trying to make the backup work. It doesn’t.

MT is, to a non-programmer such as myself, often incomprehensible and beyond cranky. If you don’t hold your mouth just right and pray to the Gods of Venus and Mars and turn around three times counter-clockwise and genuflect to Rome, Mecca and Wall Street, it just won’t cooperate. Unless, of course, you are someone who can whip out Perl and SQL code, etc., in your sleep. MT runs great … as long as you don’t touch it. When something goes wrong, look out.

Add to that the recent comment spam and other worries that Perl scripting introduces, I decided this morning to just screw it and move on. I’ve had my eye on a much simpler and more elegant solution for quite some time: Textpattern, created by Dean Allen, daddy of the Oliver Dog and the Hugo Dog, and S.O. of the always intelligent and interesting Gail Armstrong, all of whom are happily living in the south of France. [And if you’re not checking in for your daily dose of Oliver and Hugo, well, you’re just not in touch with what’s right in the world. Cures my cranky-pants every time I see them.]

Textpattern is a wonderful little CMS, very clean and simple, based on PHP. And I should have transitioned long ago. Textpattern took me exactly three minutes and 45 seconds to install, from download to entering my first entry. Compare that with Movable Type, which took multiple failed tries over two weeks, followed by $25 to Six Apart, followed by an appointment for installation, followed by the installation, followed by follow-up e-mails, followed by a few weeks of laborious coding on templates. All I can say is the Oliver Dog’s Dad rocks the house.

Of course, as with anything technological, there is a bit of pain involved: Stripping AirBeagle.com’s template pages of all of their Movable Type tags and replacing them with the new TP tags, as well as learning the new nomenclature of said TP tags. But we should be back up to speed in a few days as I find time to get all the templates converted.

Until I get things running, as I mentioned earlier, you won’t be able to add any more comments until further notice. If you have something to say, please feel free to send me an e-mail (mail | at | this domain.com). Otherwise, thanks for reading and for your patience.