Click gets a new server on Monday, April 28

Click, and the rest of the insidesocal.com blogs that are part of the Los Angeles Daily News and the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, are getting a new server, with the transition happening some time during the morning of Monday, April 28.

We've been having more than one problem or another for quite some time -- from the comments being creaky (I just turned them off when the spam got out of hand the and sign-in scripts weren't working) to publishing of entries (and the dozens of category, index and archive pages that go with them) timing out.

Aside from the comments, you, the reader, might not have been all that aware of the pain we as bloggers have experienced. If you've tried to leave a comment and had your screen frozen for an age, you have an inkling of what we're talking about.

In my estimation, the problems up until now have been, in various proportions, server overload, limitations of the Movable Type system that runs these blogs, and generally poor configuration of both Movable Type and the server apps themselves. (Historical note: I believe that insidesocal.com began on a Windows server and subsequently made the transition to Linux.) Until now, the server has been run by an outside company. Hopefully we will address all of the previously mentioned problems with our new server cluster, which is being run by parent company MediaNews in Denver.

Thus far, my far-away assessment of the new setup -- and those who run it -- is very high. We hope to fix a lot of broken things and make all of the insidesocal.com blogs better than they have ever been.

Cliches, I know, but as far as Movable Type setups go, I'm not aware of any that are as complicated as ours. We have hundreds of blogs spread over many different newspaper properties, with lots of add-ons to tie the blogs to our many Web properties. We're also serving ads and trying to actually make this whole damn thing pay.

I'll be spending a lot of time on Monday helping users get acclimated to Movable Type Open Source 4.1. It's a bit different than Movable Type 4.01 (the non-free version), with added features, some things that work better but, thus far, a few new bugs. I think our setup can handle the open-source version, which gets new features and improvements. If I understand the process correctly (and I aim to understand much, much more about Movable Type), the open-source version is a kind of test bed for the non-free version. I'm OK with that.

Actually, if our many-dozen bloggers can manage to get their entries published, their comments moderated, and the whole thing doesn't sink into the ocean, I'll be happy.