Upgrading to PHP 5.0.4
My hosting service, DreamHost.com, announced months ago that PHP 5 is available for our use. At that time, as this Blog may suggest, I was overwhelmed with .NET and VBA crap so months did pass… and now the upgrade process has started. I started with kintespace.com first, because I thought it has only one PHP page, the kinté search page. At least a few hundreds of you machines and humans noticed that the Blog was down for at least four hours. The Blog is a PHP application! This slipped my mind. This is why software developers should never experiment directly with production systems. You reading this now means that we are back online.
I’m guessing that I lost the Blog when I switched PHP engines—from an Apache module to the relatively more secure CGI thang. Anyway, this permission error came up—you might have seen it—and I made it go away by renaming the old /rasxlog and installing a new copy of WordPress in a new folder called /rasxlog. Because the installation was connecting to an existing database—full of data like this stuff you are reading now—, I could not use the install.php I used upgrade.php instead. This solved two problems—perhaps more…
So, anyway, the original plan was to get PHP 5 running. The reason why no new audio content has appeared on kintespace.com is because of the lack of serious XML and XSLT support in PHP 4.x. Songhay System needs to build one Flash-based audio application that supports n-number audio presentations. XML and XSLT can be used to supply a “manifest” declaring the contents of the audio presentation so Flash can change its interface accordingly. PHP running XML allows Songhay System to concentrate on one Flash-based audio presentation user interface for kintespace.com—instead of having multiple SWF files laying around built from various versions of Flash over the years.