Blog Archives Now Displaying Correctly

First let me say that I had just taken my bed sheets out of the dryer, picked me a nice midnight drink, placed my current book I’m reading on the nightstand and was sleepily making my way to bed after doing some maintenance around the house……but just wanted to check my blogs I have not been doing on a regular basis lately….then found ….my archives aren’t showing!! What happened! I knew I couldn’t go to bed this early, something had to keep me up since I decided not to go clubbing!
Seems like when I was experimenting with “Dynamic Rebuild of Archives” I forgot to take the option off or follow through with the complete “Dynamic Rebuild” option!
I have been really busy with a lot of personal matters and far more important issues and haven’t been keeping tabs on my blog or website lately.
I finally went to the great Movabletype Support Forums http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?s=4b206edffa59c46feefe8e32ec3816f7 and found a relevant discussion thread. That got me back on track!
This is the general overview of what I ran into.
Clicked on an archive link on my “Main Blog” page and discovered that the link gave the “404” page not found error! Tried every other archive link I could and they all gave the same error…..eh! Now my mind is kinda peeking around the corner of the let’s not go to bed mode.
I had not been on my webserver for a while but it was still serving up my other pages just fine! Hell I don’t have many pages to serve why is it burping on my “blog archives!?
Tried the simple thing first created a new entry and figured it would rebuild and them all archives would come back, this didn’t happen.
Then I went on my Linux system that’s serving up my web pages and compared my archive files with the archive preferences in the Blog’s core config and that appeared correct. Did a rebuild of my templates and still the 404 error!
Did a rebuild of all Blog files still the 404 error?
I then looked at my starting index.html file for my blog and it looked to compare with my preferences I then went into my directory on my webserver that holds the archives and discovered that all of my archive files ended with “.static”!
I looked around the manual and FAQ’s for a while but I was really tired soooo… Time to hit up the Movabletype forum for some info! Then found a thread where someone else ran into this yesterday and it was pointed out that the underlying issue was that he switched to dynamic rebuilding for his templates. He went and completed the task of converting to dynamic rebuilds! I’m not as experienced in that and could not find the info but at least I knew what the issue was!
I also found another thread that stated that not many plug-INS were available for the dynamic rebuilding templates at this time so that made me feel more justified in reverting back.
So I switched back to “Build All Templates Statically” and rebuilt the site! Now all my archives are back! The only thing is when I looked in the archive directory it recreated all of the archive html files without the “.static” suffix but left the files with the “.static” suffix created with the ” Build Only Archive Templates Dynamically” option
You know what who cares if I have duplicated files but with different extensions in that directory? I have the drive space and the files are small. Heck it took me longer to write this entry so I can recall what I did, than to get a resolution to the issue! I’ll deal with it another time, I’m going to bed!!
I’ll keep my eye on my site a bit more even when I’m busy!!