OT: For want of single quotes a website was lost!
Now that the covid vaccine induced brain fog seems to have dissipated I’ve set myself to cleaning up and reorganizing my websites. Some of my code is old enough to vote!
SoftwareTimes: Creation Date: 1998-06-01
I started SoftwareTimes to learn to develop websites. When the Gilder forum fell apart in 2000 I decided to post my rants at SoftwareTimes. It’s where I run my Portfolio app which I have been thinking of making public but under a different domain. I’m thinking of using captainccs.com.
As a first step I’ve been doing laptop spring cleaning which has collected a huge amount of debris over the years. Today I updated the PhpErrorReporter code on all my websites. When I tested it all I got was blank screens on all but one of my websites which runs on a different server! With all the hacking going around (worse than Covid), web hosts have to take extreme care and sometimes on gets locked out of one’s own websites. That’s what I though had happened but I noticed that one website, which was showing a blank screen was still reacting so maybe that was not the problem. I trashed the help desk ticket I was composing and started to do some debugging.
One of the safety measures is that we no longer display debugging error messages on the screen in production websites because hackers use them to break into websites. That was the reason for the blank screens. If you don’t know what happening, how do you fix it? I ran the code on my laptop and the bug was easy to find. Double quotes where single quotes were required.
It’s incredible how moronically stupid computers can be yet they can fly us to the moon! Humans use context to understand one another. Computer languages have no notion of context, they are idiot savants that take everything literally.
<meta charset="utf-8">
instead of
<meta charset='utf-8'>
and the world stops!
The Captain