HELIOLITH

Spent a lonnggg time this evening wrestling with mt.cfg (movable type configuration file) for hours & finally… I have success… thank you again to Elise at www.elise.com/mt/ and various google searches, forum threads on the error messages I was getting whilst trying to install Movable Type. The most important tidbit I discovered…

that held me up the longest was simply that on our server (Aplus.net) although a complete path to the MySql database was available, MT finally worked after I actually omitted that path, and simply included the actual database name (which in my case was the same as my FTP username.
here’s what got it working for me:

ObjectDriver DBI::mysql
DBPort 3306
Database username
DBUser username

(note that I simply replaced my username with “username” and that on my server that is both the (uneditable) name of the MySQL database AND the database login name. I needed to goto the cp.aplus.net
control panel to create my database password.

It’s interesting I wonder what percentage of the people who install MT have not tech training or work in the tech sector. I imagine Six Apart must have some idea of that demographic. The actual installation is tricky enough to make me feel like somewhat of a geek for simply succeeding (haha)! Ah well, it’s a broad continuum. To some I’m a geek, to others, a n00b =P. I’m quite happy with the flexibility and independence that MT gives me over Blogger, and am considering incorporating MT into my classroom.

I document this here only to celebrate my first-ever installation (simple as it may be) of a server-side application. More importantly, maybe someone in my boat will stumble across this post via Google and hopefully, have to waste fewer hours vexed and perplexed, wrestling with syntax and with no knowledge of Perl.