WMSE Archives Fixed

If you’re a fan of WMSE and been frustrated that you haven’t been able to download archives of you favorite shows, I’ve got good news for you, the Archives are fixed! (Said with my fingers crossed.) 

Ever since the launch of the new site, the station had been getting sporadic reports of errors on the archive page. None of the station staff could reproduce the error and neither could I. If you know anything about software development, it is short of impossible to fix a bug if you can’t reproduce it.

The constant stream of emails to the station told us the problem was very real. Then the school informed us they were going to be upgrading to PHP5 on the server, they setup a new environment and told us to test. Sure enough the archives didn’t work under PHP5. At least now I could reproduce a problem and I hoped solving it would solve the other problem.

Since maintaining the site is not my day job, I have do any work after my kids go to bed. I spend most of the night last Monday re-writing the page from scratch, and ultimately got it to work. I wish I could say I knew exactly what it was, but my grasp of PHP is very small. The only thing I saw out of the ordinary was a call to a Postgres database being made using some deprecated API calls. Given the actual code was several years old, I wasn’t too surprised.

Even with that fixed, I really can’t wait to get the site onto a proper CMS. The staff at the station have a ton of ideas for the site and while the new site looks great, it still isn’t flexible enough to take them where they want to go. We’ll get there eventually, but at least for now you can get at all the great shows in the archive.