urban dialogues

# Do not attempt to do an upgrade late at night when you are about to go to sleep and no one on earth is awake who can help you if you screw up.
# There have been some changes to the MT platform, including incompatibility with the BigPAPI plugin. See http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/docs/3.3/mt33_platform_changes.html for a description of the changes. According to Six Apart, "you should disable BigPAPI and any BigPAPI pluginsfrom the System Overview plugin listing unless you have updated them with a Movable Type 3.3 compatible version." Update any plugins you have installed with their newest MT3.3 compatible versions.
# Back up your database. (See Backing Up Your Blog).
# Create a new directory on your server for the MT3.3 program files. If your existing MT files are in a directory called "mt", label this new directory something like "mt33" or "mt331", so you can tell the difference.
# Download the full version (or upgrade version, they're the same now) of MT3.3 from Six Apart.
# Upload the files to the new directory. If your new directory is in the cgi-bin, make sure you upload the mt-static directory outside of the cgi-bin, to somewhere in your public_html directory. Upload the images in the mt-static directory as binary files. Upload all other files as text.

Blog Maintenance

Movable Type weblogs require some level of maintenance, beyond just adding new content. Here are some suggestions that can help keep your blog running smoothly. If you have other suggestions not on this list, please let us know in the comments section.

Dead Links

If you link to any other websites from your blog, and or have comments or TrackBacks enabled, you need to periodically scan your site to make sure that your external links are still active. Links with URLs that are no longer valid give a "404" server error when someone clicks on them.

One of the biggest deadlink culprits can come from TrackBack links. Periodically click on the "TrackBack" button on the left side of your weblog edit screen and review your Trackbacks. Clicking on the links given will show whether or not the link still works. Delete those TrackBacks that don't. To make this task more manageable, you may want to delete all TrackBacks on posts past a certain age.