Okay, that took a bit of doing, but here we are back with what *looks* like the same blog, but on a different provider. For those who like to hear about these kind of things, here's the tale of the process...
Jeff Kaiser, who I turn to in all matters of internetitude, suggested that I drop my old provider ipowerweb and switch over to GoDaddy.com. I had noticed recently that ipower used to be staffed by Americans and now had switched over to Calcutta, and that tech support was now just people going thru one of those "Choose Your Own Adventure" scripts devoted to getting the rubes off the phone asap.
So, first, I backed up everything off my old server. Then I contacted GoDaddy and set up my plan. The first hurdle: to get both my domain and my hosting over to GoDaddy. And it turned out that www.tedmills.com was owned not by ipowerweb, nor by networksolutions, but by, oh no! onestopnet, a provider I had completely forgotten about. Turned out they were still around, but nobody was at home. No live help, nobody at the 24/7 tech line. I left a message, but then turned back to Network Solutions and said they really should force the issue. I had checked out onestopnet online and the reports were not good. Absent since 2006 or so.
Fortunately, networksolutions got this going for me quickly and in a few days my domain was unlocked so godaddy could get it. Okay, so I uploaded everything to godaddy. The site was there, but I didn't thiink that the blog was working.
Oh! the reason turns out that I needed to back up my MySQL database over at ipowerweb. I had to call Calcutta a few times and finally got that figured out, all 2mb worth downloaded to my desktop. A bit of a worry when it came as an Oracle file and not a .sql or .bak file, but lawdy, GoDaddy took it anyway.
Ok, now...movable type still wouldn't work. I sent off mail to my friend who lent his more experienced eye to the problem...but couldn't fix it.
I called GoDaddy for the 12th time and it turns out no cgi scripts would work because I had signed up for the economy plan and well, economy has no cgi. For fukkksake. Okay, for $60 more for 3 years, I get boosted to Deluxe hosting. Okay, so finally Movable Type is working.
So now I upgrade to 4.2.5 and after a bit...it works! And here we are. Now, I would like to set about getting tags to work on every page. And now I'd like to start reshaping the blog so it incorporates all the social networking I do on other sites, mostly twitter and facebook. So we'll see what we can do.
By the way, this entry is being written at my local coffee shop on my Hackintosh Dell Mini 10v, a concurrent project that took place during the whole provider move story. That's another entry, but here I am writing, publishing, and more. Nice!
