Asgrim

So after a little hacking at lunch today, I discovered just why half my websites don’t work. It’s a very simple reason…

PHP4 vs. PHP5.

Yes, Newnet are still stuck in the year 2000, and are using the “favourite old shoes” version 4 of PHP. Please, Newnet, PLEASE upgrade to PHP5. Not for me, but for the sake of your hosting service. Not to mention the fact development for PHP4 actually stopped seven months ago! Not only that but security updates will be stopping in August apparently! Surely that’s two really big reasons to upgrade.

And that goes to every other webhost stuck on PHP4. At least provide two hosting options - one PHP4 for those developers stuck in the year 2000, and a PHP5 option for those developers who are modern and up-to-date.

This article is a good debate.

After several days of stress, tiredness, anger, fustration and all sorts, we’ve moved into the new house and everything is done (for the mean time anyway…).

Firstly, the servers. I took them to a friend’s house to stay there temporarily until I could get my new internet line set up. Unfortunately after a day or two of waiting for DNS updates to propogate through the world, it looked like it just wouldn’t work. I didn’t have time to fiddle around making it work, I just needed the sites up as I have a couple of important clients. I’ve had to shell out at my own cost, temporary hosting at Newnet. So far so good except for the fact I cannot get any PHP error logs, which is fustrating as the Frosthold site does not work properly at the moment. I managed to get this blog back up and running after finding that my Feedburner Stats plug-in doesn’t work on the Newnet servers, so that’s disabled for now (coding fail perhaps?). I’m still waiting for their online support service to give me some sort of response (24 hours later, and not even a “we have acknowledged your ticket”… Unfortunately due to the temporary migration to newnet, Tom’s blog and Hannah’s blog won’t be working as I stupidly set them to use the same DB prefix (wp_), and I can only afford one MySQL database. Sorry chap and chapette…

The actual house move went fairly smoothly, albeit loads of heavy lifting and Hannah and I cursing at each other when boxes were dropped on each other (and no, thats not some kind of kinky game..). The new house is absolutely gorgeous, and we’re having a few people over tonight to celebrate our engagement as well as the house warming. Now I know that the blog is working, I’ll take a few pictures to show everyone what it’s like.

Here’s what I got up to today:

• James has Freesat now. TV Solved. Now broadband to solve. (2008-07-03 08:14:00)
• James is loving salami. (2008-07-03 12:09:06)
• James likes Jam. http://tinyurl.com/5w2ggr (2008-07-03 13:23:05)
• James is strapping himself up with a young lad… (2008-07-03 13:46:50)
• James is hailing the new flesh! (2008-07-03 13:49:21)
• James is bowing to him faithfully and splendidly…?! (2008-07-03 16:30:27)

Here’s what I got up to today:

• James just exploded his nut sack over Sii. (2008-07-02 08:44:37)
• James is tired and grotty. Also hating Leaders estate agents - they’re rubbish. (2008-07-02 11:36:34)
• James is struggling to get teh internets. (2008-07-02 12:10:29)
• James is annoyed that TPON was invented as it means lots of messing around. Bloody BT. (2008-07-02 13:13:25)
• James is having Broadband and TV hassle. Gash. (2008-07-02 16:18:38)

Here’s what I got up to today:

• James has moved!! (2008-07-01 14:02:10)

Here’s what I got up to today:

• James is so tired. All boxes moved. Now to sort out bitty stuff tomorrow. (2008-06-30 23:07:11)

Here’s what I got up to today:

• James is mostly packed… and now sitting looking at a huge pile of boxes. (2008-06-29 16:10:39)

Here’s what I got up to today:

• James started the morning with an epic fail - setting the alarm off! (2008-06-27 07:50:33)
• James also fails at resetting the alarm (2008-06-27 09:38:06)
• James is still wondering what the yellow “Danger” icon is on his task bar… (2008-06-27 11:43:18)
• James can’t wait to be in the middle of no-where with Hannah. (2008-06-27 11:52:20)

This article I found on the Mind Tree Blog sort of covers old ground for me, but it was interesting nonetheless. It’s interesting the way he doesn’t forward specific things, but rather everything in the URL… so we’d forward something like:

http://www.asgrim.com/channel/Google/news/something/

to:

http://www.asgrim.com/index.php?p=channel/Google/news/something/

and letting the PHP script decode the specifics of the URL, rather than setting up specific forwards like:

http://www.asgrim.com/index.php?module=channel&provider=Google&section=news&article=something

I’m not sure which I prefer. The method mentioned in the article does give extra flexibility without having to modify the .htaccess, but the latter gives more specification as to how the URLs should work. I guess at the end of the day it’s up to opinion.