Going live with the blog
I couldn't go live with all of the previous stuff that makes the blog work until I had two very important things:
- Durable MySQL connections
- EMailed error reports
By default MySQL/MariaDB and other SQL servers like to drop DB connections that are idle for a specific period of time. It would be bad if this website only ran for a relatively short time and then started reporting "DB server went away"!
To prevent that I dug into my ages old MySQL client lib wrapper and added things to enable the "auto-reconnect" feature. I've had it running on my in-house server for a while now and I keep getting pages. So check that one off the list.
Lastly I want to be notified of errors on the site via email. Many times over the years I've felt like web development happens on one side of a wall while the users are on the other side. You don't get to see their experience, more importantly the errors they run into. Sure many servers log errors into a log somewhere. But usually your not aware of your users' poor experience until something drastic happens to call your attention to it. And then the usual web developer tools (especially PHP) like to spew rivers of useless messages for a variety of reasons. Emails for crashes are a brilliant solution!
Especially since this is a brand new project with very little running experience with all that has been assembled together, I want to know when something goes wrong without having to go hunting for it. So I have emailed crash reports. Check that off the list! Now I know "no news" is "good news".
Being that the dry and warm season is particularly short around here and I have much to do outdoors. Its probably going to be a while before I can get back to this. If only I could work on it full time!
