Our previous Web-site hosting company, Mesopia.com, corrupted our MovableType database during a recent server relocation. Our only choice was to recreate the database based on static HTML files I downloaded from our Web site.
This has taught me several lessons:
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Always generate a backup version of every posting in XML format with all the data necessary to regenerate the post.
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XHTML is your friend. Because our posts all validated as strict XHTML, I was able to use XSL transformations to convert from the static post to an XML representation, which I later used to generate an MT import file.
I’ll be redesigning the site in the next week or two, and I’ll be keeping these hard learned lessons in mind.