Geeklog 1.4.0rc2 and stuff

Last night, xania.org achieved a whole year’s uptime! Hooray!

Rather embarrasingly I had had the year uptime anniversary in my diary, and celebrated by updating the GeekLog blog system I use on GodboltBlog to the latest release candidate — GeekLog 1.4.0rc2.

The new version sports several nice new features — trackback and pingback with spam filter support, an advanced HTML editor, better syndication support and a more modular design with the poll system and the links system now being plugins.

The installation went fairly well — because I had previously patched my geeklog with trackback and pingback support (prior to the spam support that is), my database tables were already partially fixed up. As a result, the first upgrade hosed the database completely, and I had to restore from backup. I strongly recommend that you do backup (like the installer says!) before attempting an upgrade!

Even with some hasty MySQL administration fiddling, I couldn’t quite get the SQL update script doing what I needed; so I resorted to manually editing the SQL script to cater for my modified database schema. It didn’t take more than ten minutes in total.

Getting my modified layout was also involved. I’ve always manually updated the CSS and thtml files used in GeekLog, but this time around I used Araxis Merge to perform a three-way merge from the original unadulterated geeklog 1.3 source, my modified 1.3 layout, and the 1.4 layout. This proved very successful, I would recommend trying it yourself. Ideally I would have used TortoiseMerge, but sadly that doesn’t (yet?) support 3-way directory diffs.

As a result of the upgrade, I’ve not yet reinstalled the stats or forum plugins. I’m fairly tempted to not install either; the forums were woefully underused and the stats package merely bloats the database backup with an enormous volume of information that I no longer use. I don’t use it any more because xania.org doesn’t have the processing power necessary to churn through and generate the relevant pages in real time. Instead, I’ve been using Google Analytics instead, which I notice has just sent out some more beta invitations.