EGAD

Technical Difficulty [Resolved]

For a couple of weeks, the error below would appear whenever one tried to update a post or comment on my blog. Shane, the dude who operates UThink, has fixed the trouble, but I'm preserving the post for the benefit of the Googlebrain.

Can't use string ("MT::App") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at /htdocs/cgi-bin/blog-ssl/lib/MT/App.pm line 1294.

The root cause remains mysterious, but the error apparently occurred whenever MT tried to rebuild the page containing a post that used an image located on an external server. Making this image available locally negated this behavior. So if by some chance you got here by Googling for this error text, give that a try. My original post is below the fold.

Apparently, whenever somebody posts a comment here, that one will arrive at a cryptic error message generated by the blogging software here. Upon hitting the "go back" button the user shall return to the post in question, looking for all the world as if the post has not yet been submitted.

In actuality, your post has been submitted. Just his reload to see it. If you hit submit again, two copies of your post will appear, which will eventually frustrate me and cause me to delete one of them. I would like this error to go away and stop confusing people, but even though it is a straightforward Perl error and not cryptic at all to me, I do not know my way around the innards of Moveable Type, and it is thus not helpful, either. This problem is new-ish, and I suspect is related to the fact that I have not updated my site templates since the upgrade to a newer version of MT.

Oh well. Perhaps someday I shall work out the problem. In the meanwhile, please do not be confused by the strange error. For future reference, it looks like this:

Can't use string ("MT::App") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at /htdocs/cgi-bin/blog-ssl/lib/MT/App.pm line 1294.