Archive - Originally posted on "The Horse's Mouth" - 2013-04-29 08:03:42 - Graham Ellis
A bright spring morning!
Any regular readers may have notices that the addition of comment and text to this blog has been patchy during April; failure at Easter to rebuild the server based on Centos rather than Fedora, and to build fresh releases of Apache httpd, PHP, MySQL and the other tools that we use. And I took advantage of the changes to restore content directory by directory, rather than just restoring a complete backup.
Of course, the first 90% of the work took the first 90% of the time, and the final 10% took the other 90% - a longer project that envisaged. Moving up to a very recent PHP has removed some ancient facilities, but that wasn't a problem. I did, however, get caught by "short open tags" which were on in my old build, off in the new one by default, and gave a sprinkling - no more - of syntax errors in one or two very complex generated files. On Perl, the new build has a different include path to the old one. And that resulted in a single script - the one that generates the blog archives - failing on one of my tailored templates. I was getting truncated pages ... NOT easy to spot, but fixed in a couple of minutes once the reason for the failure was established. All in all, much good work done, a confident base to move forward, and a bright spring morning (so bright that the chap across from me in the train is having to shield his screen from the flooding sunlight!)
I'm not going to suggest that every issue on the web site is fixed. It's grown up over the years, and was not done with "Test Driven Development". A new site today... and I would be using Cucumber, Selenium, Watir Webdrivers or something like, and perhaps PHPUnit too. The next stage - as time allows - is to start adding some of those progressively to the more critical areas of the site, then to some of the darker corners. Today, however, I'm off to give a Python course.