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Blog Outage, Blame PHP

My blog hasn’t been up and running for the last 24 hours or so. This is because I foolishly decided to upgrade to PHP5. After playing “guess which extensions wordpress-pg needs,” I then got served up a lovely blank page.

But what’s really annoying is that there was no indication at all of anything going wrong in the error log. Or on the browser. Just nothingness. After inserting lots and lots of debug “echo” statements (thankfully I know enough PHP to do that), I eventually tracked the point of stoppage down to a call to pg_fetch_object(). Close inspection of the manual revealed that it had changed how it was called between version 4 and 5. Great backwards compatibility, guys! Removing the last parameter enabled me to get going again though. I just wish I had been able to see an error.

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wordpress & backslashes

One of my pet peeves about wordpress is that because it’s based on PHP and MySQL it doesn’t like backslash characters at all. It just eats them up and screws up your post. But I’ve found a simple answer. Use numeric entities instead. Just type in \ or \ to get a nice \backslash.