Knit Climb Java v2
upgrading Pebble and Tomcat
I bit the bullet last night and upgraded my website to run a non-antiquated application server (kind of like a webserver but for dynamic content like a shopping cart, or a blog) and the latest version of Pebble (the actual blog software I use).
I upgraded from Tomcat 4.1.27 to Tomcat 5.5.17 (which is the latest Tomcat version that my hosting company, WebAppCabaret, currently offers). The startup/shutdown of the appserver is noticibly faster. Hopefully it deals with memory management better (I was always having to restart my website before).
But upgrading to Pebble 2.x has made the most noticible changes (not only from the obvious look and feel changes) but also from a functionality standpoint too. Simon Brown has really done a great job of adding some nice features to Pebble in this last release.
Some things you may notice with Pebble 2.x:
- Rich Text Comments: Now when you leave a comment you have the option of using a rich text editor as well as writing plain HTML (Click the "add a comment" link and you'll see what I mean).
- Sidebar Tag Cloud: You can still see all the tags I use, but now you can see the most common ones right in the sidebar.
- Better spam filters: So... I haven't been able to test this one out yet. But I have faith. I was getting up to 20 spam comments/day with my old blog (which is why all comments had to be manually approved). Now, hopefully the comment filter will handle it for me.
I ran into a couple small snags when upgrading to Pebble 2.x, but nothing I couldn't handle (thank you Simon for your help).
- Failed reindex: After following Simon's upgrading how-to, my categories showed up, and my images showed up, but none of the blog entries were there. I tried reindexing all the blog entries, but nothing happened. I looked at the log files and saw that the SAXParser was dieing somewhere. After some further debugging I found there were three 0kb blog entries (somehow). After removing those, all my blog entries were restored.
- Migrating Drafts: Pebble gives you the ability to save draft copies of your blog entries. I have a few that I've been working on for awhile, and a couple that I abandoned. They didn't transfer over when I upgraded, but all I need to do is copy and paste them and resave the drafts. No big deal because there aren't too many of them.
Overall I'm psyched with Pebble 2.x. I'm sure I'll find tons of new administrative features that I'll love using too. I'm not 100% sold on the new look&feel that I've designed so please comment with any constructive criticisms and glowing praise that you may have. I'm sure I'll be tweaking it a lot in the next few weeks as I figure out more how I want this thing to look in its latest incarnation.