I just realized this evening that the "Send Mark a Direct Message" form on each page of my blog has been broken for quite some time. An oversight on my part caused my code to reject messages from several readers. Anyways, it's been fixed and I'd like to extend my sincere apologies to the many blog readers who tried to contact me without success.
What the heck happened anyways?
Well, several weeks ago I decided to increase the max size of acceptable messages from 200 characters to 400. I tweaked my JavaScript to accept longer messages, but I somehow forgot to update the PHP that processes all incoming blog comments. As a result, my PHP code was only processing messages less than 200 characters, and blindly rejecting everything else (even though my blog itself says the max message length is 400 characters). I'm sure this was confusing and irritating to many folks.
It's amazing how forgetting to change one character in a piece of code can really throw a huge monkey wrench into an otherwise smoothly working piece of software.
What the heck happened anyways?
Well, several weeks ago I decided to increase the max size of acceptable messages from 200 characters to 400. I tweaked my JavaScript to accept longer messages, but I somehow forgot to update the PHP that processes all incoming blog comments. As a result, my PHP code was only processing messages less than 200 characters, and blindly rejecting everything else (even though my blog itself says the max message length is 400 characters). I'm sure this was confusing and irritating to many folks.
define("MAX_MESSAGE_LENGTH", 400);
It's amazing how forgetting to change one character in a piece of code can really throw a huge monkey wrench into an otherwise smoothly working piece of software.
Did you find this post helpful, or at least, interesting?