Photos

A small selection of flowers wild and cultivated

23 Feb 2019

An error unexplained

Well, that was weird.

Something had gone wrong with my little PHP script for adding items from my list at reading.am to my WithKnown-powered stream. It ran, reported no errors, and yet produced nothing at the other end. Gorgeous Saturday morning, blue skies and sunshine; what better way to spend it than indoors debugging?

Anyway, after reading part of the way through the cURL manual, my friend Sven pointed me in the right direction and I was able to see the responses that the script was receiving from my site. The weird part is that the very act of inserting a couple of extra lines of code seems to have fixed whatever wasn't working. I haven't the faintest idea why.

Anyway, having got this far, I decided to add a little snippet that checks whether there were any errors and, if not, tells me how long the request took.

if (!curl_errno($ch)) {
  $info = curl_getinfo($ch);
  echo "\n", 'Took ', $info['total_time'], ' seconds', "\n";
}

This goes inside the loop that creates each item, just before curl_close ($ch); and gives me an indication that all is well.

Unfortunately, testing this out cluttered up the timeline at micro.blog, because I was too lazy to adjust exactly what syndicates there, for which I apologise. It also still doesn't pick up any comments I may have made at Reading.am. Still useful, to me, but if I really want to add a comment I'll continue to use either Omnibear or Quill. And I still want to build something similar that will update from the Pinboard and Paperback combo.

Filed under | Geeky |