The pain, the pain

All the cool kids are doing linkblogs these days, and it seems like a pretty good idea to me, so I decided to create one today. Little did I know that decision would take me down a road of madness and agony…

To make a very long and painful story short, something is going very wrongly indeed with my Movable Type installation. The main issue is that it refuses to update itself. Which is not good.

Also, as part of the linkblog exercise, I had to sprinkle some PHP in my index file. Which made it not show up. Nothing came down the wire. Zilch, zippo, nada. But PHP works just fine on the server. So it came down to reducing the HTML until the error reared its nasty head. Turns out the culprit was the Hiveware Enkoder, which has been doing faithful duty on this page for a long time now obfuscating my email address from the evil spammers. Guess the PHP interpreter got one look at the hairy mess the Enkoder turns your email address into and went into convulsions right there on the spot. I’ll probably do a longer write-up later on some of the issues I encountered today, but the main thing is that I have my linkblog up and running. Yes indeedy. The links show up in the sidebar on the main blog, and there’s a full archive, including RSS support, at the LinkFest. This will be cool.

UPDATE: Acting on a tip from Joe that the Enkoder works just fine and dandy on his PHP-driven site, pasted in a fresh copy and it’s working great again.