I found out this evening that my Iron Curtin protecting my empire from the marauding, comment-posessing hordes must come down. You see, there is a campaign being organized to do just that – bring comments to this humble weblog. For far too long, this weblog has ignored the pleas, the cries of those with no voice on these pages. Can there be no justice for these suffering souls? No quenching their desire to attach little strings of ASCII characters to my entries, expressing their thoughts on the matter? Surely this must end!

In my defense, and all kidding aside, I have spent a few hours looking into doing just this. Today’s mt.net is powered by PHP code over three years old: ancient by Internet standards. Forget fancy style-sheets, bookmarking, and of course, easy-to-add comments.

My choices are to hack the PHP code or start with something new. I could hack the PHP code rather easily, but it still wouldn’t change the fact that the main code hasn’t been updated in forever. The other option of new software seems to be the best route, but there is still the matter of republishing the huge amount of content you’ve come to expect from mt.net. These entries must be imported into the database format of any new blog engine I wind up choosing.

And there is a lot of entries. You see, mt.net has been around for a year and a half now. While some weblogs — and I won’t mention names — are just getting started, mt.net has been providing entertainment of dubious quality since January 2002! That’s an ocean of wasted time, and we’re darn proud of it!

So if anyone has tips on tools for importing MySQL tables into new tables with different columns, I’d love to hear from you. For now, however, you’ll still have to email. 🙂