LexBlog IT Director talks about today’s platform upgrade

On Wednesday, Colin posted about a major upgrade to LexBlog’s blogging platform. Today I spoke with Jesse Newland, LexBlog’s IT Director, about the specifics of the upgrade, which is set to take place tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern time.

Rob La Gatta:

In layman’s terms, what is the new system we’re rolling out today?

Jesse Newland: The new system is best broken down as three changes:

• An upgrade to the version of Movable Type we base the LexBlog blogging platform on (specifically an upgrade from v3.21 to v3.34). While the change in version number is rather small, there are lots of changes under the hood that make things much more stable and reliable.
• An upgrade to a large number of the plug-ins we use to customize Movable Type for our clients; most significantly, the ‘LexBlog’ plug-in that we use to tailor MT to our liking has been almost completely re-written.
• An upgrade to the software we’re using to run Movable Type on our servers. This upgrade is the most important one in my mind, as it allows us to – much more easily – scale Movable Type to handle more and more clients.

Rob La Gatta: Why is LexBlog making this upgrade?

Jesse Newland: Speed, reliability, [and] scalability.

• Speed. The newer version of the LexBlog publishing platform performs much faster than the previous versions, especially when creating new blog posts (one of the most common tasks our users perform).
• Reliability. This release specifically targeted two of [the] most critical bugs: issues with tags support, and flakey comment/trackback e-mail notifications. Many other smaller bugs have [also] been fixed.
• Scalability. This upgrade will be able to handle many more concurrent users than the previous release, which is important as we grow.

Rob La Gatta: Feel pretty confident about the upgrade going smoothly?

Jesse Newland: The new system has been running on our development computer for several months now, and on an internal testing server for at least 3 weeks. All LexBlog employees have used the new system, and have reported bugs that they’ve found.

Rob La Gatta: Do you have any idea of the number of bugs you’ve encountered in your testing?

Jesse Newland: (after looking at the bug tracker) [It] looks like we’ve fixed about 50 bugs in the process of this release.

Rob La Gatta: Do those give you any idea of potential problems we could see arising from the upgrade?

Jesse Newland: I’m pretty confident in the bugs I’ve fixed in development, but as with any new system, I’m more worried about the bugs that my testing hasn’t found. I’ve set up extensive checks and logging to make sure we catch any new bugs as quickly as possible.

Rob La Gatta: What are some of the more noticeable changes users can expect to see on the backend of their blogs?

Jesse Newland: Well…

• Users will again be able to administer their own email subscriber list
• Adding tags to entries is much easier – when you begin typing the name of an already-existing tag, it is shown directly below the tag field. Pressing TAB or clicking the full tag name finishes typing it for you    
• My personal favorite: Activity Feeds. Users are able to subscribe to almost anything – new comments, new trackbacks, draft entries, etc – as an RSS feed

Rob La Gatta: Regarding that last one, Activity Feeds – how does that work? Will those be separate RSS feeds you have to subscribe to individually?

Jesse Newland: On most pages in the blog’s backend on which a table is displayed (Entries, Comments, Trackbacks, etc), users will see a familiar orange RSS icon. This icon links to an RSS feed of exactly the data displayed in that table, including any filters the user has applied (only display entries by Joe, only display Junk comments, etc).

Copying and pasting the RSS link address into an RSS reader (Bloglines, Google Reader, etc) will allow users to follow what’s going on with their blog just as any other RSS feed.

Rob La Gatta: Will the changes have any impact on how their front end of their blog looks?

Jesse Newland: None whatsoever. We’ve gone to great lengths to make sure this upgrade is as seamless as possible.

Rob La Gatta: Do you have any advice for clients who may be apprehensive about this new system?

Jesse Newland: This system is thoroughly tested, and your data is redundantly backed up. It’ll be okay.

Rob La Gatta: is there anything else you think should be mentioned about the LexBlog publishing platform upgrade?

Jesse Newland: We’ll be around this weekend if users run into any problems with the new system. Send any questions, comments or bugs to customersupport@lexblog.com, and we’ll deal with them as promptly as we can.