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When bad things make for good work

Byepilonious

There was a big PHP vulnerability last week. PHP is an underpinning of WordPress, which is a big underpinning of Most Websites that are Not Apps. It’s one of the frameworks that turns a website from plain HTML text into a much more efficient as-you-go network of various database/repository stored content and interpreted code. Which is pretty much necessary if you want to set up “I want this to behave differently and show me different things based on whether I have logged-in or not” that is a known paradigm of most websites.

It was also one of those moments that made me go “Oh, I should probably migrate my website again” and move off The Old Stack (which was starting to molder and had lots of “These things are no longer supported, and these super-critical things will not be supported come Christmas” messages).

The nice thing is that the new templates in my web-host have improved greatly. A couple of layers of things that made certain tasks annoying to make others easier have been cleared out so that more things are easy and many less are annoying. So now I am happy to report that epilonious.net:

  • Is running
  • With HTTPS
    • Without the weirdness where www.epilonious.net and epilonious.net act different
  • Without me having lost formatting in my theme
    • Because I got the proper “download everything as a file and then upload it as a file to the new site after adjusting the bigness of the file allowed to be up-bloated” plugin to work this time
  • Running on a version of PHP later than the one that come with the Bare-Bones Linux VM, proving that It Can Be Done while also giving me a bit more time in this Bare-Bones Linux VM where patches against naughty no-no’s will be supplied for a longer time.
  • And with Activity-Pub. So now if you use mastodon or pixelfed or anything like that you can subscribe-to and interact-with my author-profile at my website as epilonious@epilonious.net
    • (squeeeeee).

I feel like one of the biggest differences for why I was able to do so much and a lot faster this time was, well, Google sucks less for the time being.

Whatever data center generative AI/LLM miasma dark magic is behind the simple search bar that lets me ask “How do I upgrade my website at [host] and get a less long-in-the-tooth version of PHP installed without losing configurations.. and maybe at the end of it try to get the activity pub plugin working”, instead of getting 21534623421355 ads for hosting companies and some blog posts that worked 5 years ago in different platforms so I could cobble together my own plans and then start hacking at them…. I got a plan served up with citations and the ability to ask follow up questions and paste-in errors as they arose and basically was able to knock it all out in an afternoon.

It wasn’t perfect. There were lots of errors and assumptions I had to correct, but it was nice to just go back to one webpage where I had started my search and paste in the errors a package repo was throwing and have the search/chat go “OH, you’re using [distro A], not [distro B]… run these commands to remove the boogered repos and clean things up (!) and then THESE commands to get the proper channels set up to install PHP… this is what a clean switch should look-like” and even helping me remove some of the extra cruft after I proved out everything was working. It was also lovely to tweak it as I ran to be like “I am going to use Vi instead of Nano, because I am working through a web-terminal and if I do ctrl-W to search in a config file, it closes the browser window.”

Is this positive experience something that Google could, at any time, re-enshittify to try and get me to pay them more money (or take on the Gemini Pro freebie I got with my Pixel 11 Pro) because they desperately need to claw back the money they are dumping into making shitty polluting data centers much like the Mill Barons of centuries ago? Definitely.

Is it a breath of fresh air to get a little digital intern to work with me as a coding duck that has enough presence to go “Okay, we are getting hung up on step 6 of 15 and we need to use a different file editor to adjust this property, use that editor, run these commands to locate… then run these commands to save… and after you save and then double check by going to ____ and remember you need to save the permalinks twice to clear server cache”? Oh my goodness, yes.

Also, my workplace has access to the paid-for nice versions of these AI assistants that are an order of magnitude more powerful and about one step away from getting you the drink you want while you wait. The downside is the “how much am I contributing to earth/community killing” feeling and the constant checks that the assistants aren’t oversharing/breaking-out, or hacking the vending machines. All while wondering if I am in the top 10 percent of accuracy in the typing pool looking askance at the new Xerox machine.

But still. It’s been nice to finally get Activity Pub working and to make it through a website hardware transition without feeling as traumatized. Now I am more likely to actually USE it.

Build back better.

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