Two weeks of technical adventures

Last month the host of my personal project changed servers and everything went down. I immediately changed the A record in the domain's DNS settings, but I changed it at Hurricane Electric when I'd already moved the domain to Cloudflare and needed to change it there. As a result, the site didn't work for almost two weeks, because the main job left no time for the personal project.

I fixed the DNS record in the right place, but after that the API service still wasn't working because of an SSL error, even though its domain pointed to the main one via CNAME — but the main one had Cloudflare proxying. I changed the CNAME to a subdomain of the main domain for which the proxy is turned off.

After all this, both services kept working improperly or not at all.

It turned out that the main domain had the host's default PHP version, and after the server change the default became 8.4, while the application could only run on 8.3, so everything was down with a 500 error.

With the API service it was trickier, since its UI is built as a Telegram bot, and for some reason images weren't being sent in the bot. It turned out that over those 10 days when SSL wasn't working, Telegram had cached all the image addresses as invalid, and even after the addresses became valid, it refused to read them. In that case I had to add the current timestamp to the image addresses so they'd definitely be read.

I definitely need to prioritize building a UI for the API service, because using it through Telegram is convenient when you need to process a little something every day and respond to notifications, but when a queue piles up, you really need a proper tabular UI for bulk processing.