Mental lapse of the week

Hi. We're back. You may not have noticed we were gone, but for a while tonight StarshipTim.com was dead in space.

It was, of course, related to my upgrade endeavors, and likely because I had expected there to be some kind of problem or other, it took a long time to solve the issue because it was an unbelievably simple matter, which is to say, nothing was wrong.

I had uploaded the new guts, upgraded the PHP on the site, transferred the database, and yet, nothing but error messages. Now, I could blame the error messages for being way too vague, but I was befuddled enough that I did what no coder likes to do: ask for help from tech support. And tech support at the server farm fixed things by...doing the thing that I had just forgotten to do after loading the database, which was to flush the cache from the old database.

It's something I did literally dozens of times while building the new guts. I just forgot to do it when I tried to take it live.

Which, fine, we all forget things, but it's embarrassing to have gone to tech support and then have them come back with the PHP/MySql equivalent of "you need to turn it off and turn it back on again." The voice of Chris O'Dowd is mocking me in my head repeatedly.

That said, now that it's been done, I think all is working and we're on PHP 8.1.

One bit that I haven't yet conquered is the functionality of emailing me when someone posts a new comment, but I decided that doesn't matter because it's redundant to the comments RSS feed and I can just email subscribe to that feed.

Seriously, RSS feeds are massively undervalued by Internet users everywhere. The oligarchs (get used to that word, folks) don't like them because they allow the end user too much control and allow for easy ways to get the content you want to see without bothering with their platforms that they rely on to datamine the shit out of everyone in the world (also, because they can be structured to serve you an entire article without showing the advertising on a website, but really it's the datamining).