After what seems like forever, I have finally managed to get Movable Type OS 4.1 installed and running perfectly on my Slicehost slice.

It has taken me a few months to get to this stage, mainly because I'm not very good with Linux - Ubuntu in particular. Lots of trial and error was the order of the day for sure. Thankfully it is very easy to start again if you mess up, you just need to rebuild your slice and the slate is wiped clean. I lost count of the times I rebuilt my slice!

I thought it would be an excellent idea if I documented every configuration change and command I performed each time, so I would be able to get back to where I was before rebuilding but also just before I screwed up. This made it much easier to work out what I was doing wrong. A big thank you to Google Docs!!

I started out using Lighttpd as my web server, but I kept having problems with FastCGI, so in the end I decided to dump it for Apache. Sure it's a heavyweight and uses more resources, but I understand it more!

I also had a few problems getting some of the required Perl modules installed through CPAN, but I eventually compiled them manually and things went more smoothly.

When it came to upgrading my old blog from 3.36 to 4.1 I originally just overwrote the old files with the new ones, this was not a good idea - mainly because it didn't bloomin' work! After I deleted the old files and only used the new ones, it worked!

I also had some major problems getting comments to work. My templates are highly modified, and so I had to update a few areas to support 4.1 properly, and my AJAX-ified comments really didn't! I also had an issue with accepting TypeKey authenticated comments but that I found to be an problem with ME using MY TypeKey account - apparently I can't do that any longer and just get "Name and email address are required". Not the most helpful of error messages. Once I tried it with a totally unrelated TypeKey account it worked.

I fixed my AJAX comments by updating Prototype and Scriptaculous - not sure why I had to, I just did!!

While testing posting comments I found that it was taking ages to actually post one. Using the excellent Temper plugin by Timothy Appnel, which stands for TEMPlate profilER, I discovered that it was the Google Sitemap and Archive Index templates that were causing trouble - both taking almost 25 seconds to rebuild. I have disabled the Sitemap for the moment, and I decided to change the Archive Index around a bit. Instead of showing a link to every entry I've posted, I'm now showing just the last 6 months, and then links to the monthly archives. This has reduced the build time from around 22 seconds to a much more reasonable 1-2 seconds!

I believe I have squashed every bug I've come across in the migration process, and I am happy to replace my old blog with my new one - not that much will have changed from the outside!

There are still a few little things here and there I need to address (installing SendMail is one), but they're on the back-end and nothing for anyone else to worry about.

So welcome to Movable Type Open Source 4.1 and goodbye Movable Type 3.36.