So after salvaging a bunch of content from Google’s cache and other sources, I’ve started working on getting the site back online with a new design and a few new surprises which has been due for quite a while. First step was bump up the MovableType engine to the 3.12 version and installing a bunch of plugins – MTBlackList, MTMultiblog and others. I still need a few things left to do in the MT plugin department, but it seems a large number of plugins haven’t been upgraded to MT3.

Sometime during the night between Thursday and Friday last week, the disk RAID in this server burned two disks and forgot to enable the spare disk in the RAID. The server went down, the lights went out and the site (along with the other sites hosted here). Thanks to a Linux Magician we have a new server running – and the content should eventually start to reappear with the next few days (and weeks).

I’ve been busy hacking away on a script which would read the XMLTV format and pour it into a mysql database. It’s fun but nothing is quite as easy as it should be. I’ve rediscovered it once again. I had never before tried to parse XML data from Perl, but a quick google visit suggested it should be a breeze as everyone else seems to do it. I haven’t done my homework and really figured out what the various differences between the many methods you can parse XML is – so I basically found a few examples and picked the one the example used (XML::Parser) that.

There are quite a large number of tools available for testing and checking a website, but the most valuable is (without doubt) the Web Page Analyzer – as it does tell (and help) you optimize your site in ways you may not have thought of. I am assuming that the site in question is either valid HTML (as any good site should be) or at least tested and found working in the browsers it should work in.

If you’re php developer you should check out php | architect. It a monthly magazine aimed at PHP developers and actually quite good. It used to come in PDF-format only, but has recently also launched a dead trees version. It’s a nice mixture of tips, software reviews, interviews and programming techniques. While all articles isn’t equally interesting, it is certainly well worth the US$2.09 which the PDF-version cost. A free copy available from their site.