Steve's Ramblings

Nick commented once about some of the code in CanalPlan AC and how it was suffering from “bit rot”. Basically code that you shoved in, often as a quick dirty fix and then it starts to fail but with no good reason.

Well Wordbooker is suffering from bit rot, its just that luckily no-one has noticed it yet, well apart from me that is.

Wordbooker took code written by Robert Tsai for his plugin (Wordbook) and extended it. That is why Wordbooker is called Wordbooker – because it stands for WordbookE[xtended]R[elease]. Robert’s code used to support the WordPress PHP libraries for PHP4 and PHP5. PHP4 support was dropped but the wrappers were left inside the code, adding a level of abstraction around the calls to the Facebook PHP libraries.

When I added all the new features such as posting to walls and FB widgets and so on, into his code I sometimes used his wrappers and sometimes made the calls directly.

Facebook then depreciated some functionality and so calls to functions supporting that got commented out and eventually I stripped most of the code out.

I’d added functionality to handle comments really as a sort of proof of concept and then I added posting support to pages, but comments to pages didn’t get processed properly due to slight differences inside FB on how pages are handled.

So that was the next big project – re-write comment handling to make it a lot more robust (and at the same time simpler).

But then Facebook came along with the Graph API and the Oauth authentication process and said that all applications would be force migrated to the new Authentication method on June 1st. The new Graph API would make my job simpler as I only use a few calls (post to wall, post comment, get comment, get status, and a few FQL calls) and so obviously I should think about moving my code to use it.

That wouldn’t be bad if the Graph API was complete and not riddled with bugs (for example if you include a link in a post it thinks you are doing a “share” style post and goes and scrapes that URL – something which is not right and not how the old API works), but as it is I can’t use the new API for anything but authentication, so I’ve had to work out how to use the Oauth method for signing on, but then use the old API for the rest of my code, all under the looming date of the end of the month and with me working a day job as well.

Facebook also changed their policy on posting to walls and I asked them for clarification, and they asked for more information which I’ve given them, and now I’m waiting to hear back from them. It could mean that I have to change my code, but actually it will make the process easier to code and make it easier for the user to understand, so I am going to make the changes any way.

WordPress is also changing – with 3.0 coming out really soon now – and I wanted to make my install more multiblog friendly : so 4 tables per WP install rather than 4 tables per blog which means some quite jolly logic to work out if you are in WP2 (or WPMU2) or WP3 (running in single or multiple blog mode)

So I’m revisiting my old code and wondering if I should really throw 80% of it away and strip away the crud and spaghetti that seems to have collected during my rapid development of the project. I’ve now got a much clearer idea of how things should work and how the code should flow, and how to code round the countless “failures” of the FB back end which occur at depressingly frequently intervals, some of which I did last night when a couple of users were basically stuck because FB were playing round with code on the live servers again.

Was trying to check a problem with Canalplan AC today and as its sitting on the server in the living room I thought I should try it “remotely” rather than access off the local network.

So I got the O2 broadband dongle and powered it up and connected, and couldn’t reproduce the error… Oh well, thats how things go, especially when you are talking about IE8.

So whilst I was connected I thought I’d just hop onto this blog site and check a couple of things.

Sorry – No Can Do! Not Possible. Kept telling me the site was not available.

But it sits on the same server as Canalplan AC. It sits on blogs.canalplan.org.uk when Canalplan is on www.canalplan.org.uk.

So if one responds, then the other other should. Right?

Well you are wrong:

Here is the output of a ping command:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Users\steve>ping www.canalplan.org.uk

Pinging www.canalplan.org.uk [212.159.61.36] with 32 bytes of data:

So that’s good – its getting the IP address. It wont ever respond to pings because the router dumps them.

So lets try for the blogs:

Microsoft Windows [Version 6.0.6002]
Copyright (c) 2006 Microsoft Corporation.  All rights reserved.

C:\Users\steve>ping blogs.canalplan.org.uk
Ping request could not find host blogs.canalplan.org.uk. Please check the name and try again.

Nope – its not there.

The DNS servers for O2 don’t recognise it as a valid host name.

Tosspots.

OR rather its their Windows software that is screwy. If I power up under Linux then it works fine!