The more you overtake the plumbing...

While the bot war has entered a lull—we'll need to wait until the calendar flips in order to see a good data benchmark to confirm that the mitigation efforts are consistently working—I've been spending some time addressing some collateral damage that's piled up since major war efforts began a few weeks back.

This site is built on a pretty great platform, but Internet infrastructure technology keeps changing and thus when I tweak one thing to address issue A, a second thing breaks causing issue B; in fixing issue B, I discover that what used to work as a fix doesn't anymore because PHP syntax has changed and now we need an update to the platform guts to satisfy that. But then we get a new conflict with issue C, because I built that section years ago when things were still running on PHP 5 and the upgrade is confused now. It's a little like the nursery rhyme about the spider and the fly.

Anyway, most of these headaches won't be evident to you the reader (I hope) unless you happen upon the site right at the moment I've broken something; most of this is under-the-hood stuff. But having solved most of the problems, one remains and it's annoying the heck out of me because I can't figure out what's broken. The back end keeps throwing database errors at me even though function doesn't appear to be at all impaired and everything renders fine.

I could just choose to live with it, I guess, but you know me—am I going to do that? No, of course not. Perfectionist brain won't allow it.

All of which is to say that:

• We may experience some downtime in the next couple of days while I attempt a rather extreme cleaning out of site guts in search of the gremlin.
• It may turn out that I'm better off upgrading the platform, which would be good but that always generates more unintended consequences.
• Meanwhile, in clearing up collateral damage I reconfigured my RSS backend so that it will work with my old email notification system despite Cloudfare stuff, so I'm junking that MailerLite daily email thing and you all should go back to getting single-post updates as they go live. (MailerLite was more trouble than it was worth, it's not intended for little stuff like this.) For the moment, there's no "sign up for email updates" button that works (the existing one still goes to MailerLite and will do nothing EDIT: The button now goes to Feedrabbit again as a functional stopgap), so if you want to add your name to the list, say so in the comments or email me a note.

Now, back to gremlin hunting...