Explaining a Quiet Week

I got to my office this Monday morning following my week in Niagara Falls for my mom’s 90th birthday, and discovered that my hosting provider, had finally moved my main and oldest site, Energion.com to its new server.

I understand quite well why it took them some time to move. The site is complicated and large, in no small degree because I have been adding pages to it since the mid 90s, and if there is any bad coding practice I have ever used, it’s going to be somewhere in there.

Unfortunately, though they did a good job overall, they broke one key point, the access to SOAP. They did so by simply starting to use the PEAR SOAP extension rather than the built-in ones from PHP. The result was that a good portion of the site, specifically anything that used the Amazon Associate Web Services died immediately. So besides trying to catch up on the inevitable stuff that gathers in one’s office while one is gone for a week, I had to translate that code. In the end, while it should have been simple to change the built-in SOAP stuff to PEAR, I chose to change the whole thing to use REST, which I have wanted to do, but never got around to.

That, in turn, led me to work on a number of other annoying things, and one thing led to another. The site is not only my oldest, but it often gets the least maintenance. When I’m about nose deep in PHP code, I rarely think about things concerning which I might blog, and thus, well, I didn’t blog. I know this was a severe disappointment to my large[ly imaginary] audience, but I had to do it–I just had to!

So here I am, beginning to pretend there’s a universe out there again. Hello World!