Oops

I learned a valuable lesson last night, and managed to escape from the situation unscathed!

I was working on some enhancements to the events calendar on the LGBT Center’s web site. Specifically, I was working on a list view of events, which would group events occuring on the same day under the same date. This is insanely easy to do in ColdFusion, but every time I try to recreate it in PHP, I feel as though I’m reinventing the wheel, and it’s always quite painful.

I felt as though I almost had it last night, when I apparently sent the PHP script into an endless loop, with each iteration throwing an error. So what’s the big deal? I have a custom error handler which sends an email for each and every error.

By the time it stopped, I had literally thousands of error emails in my mailbox. I was convinced that I was going to get yelled at by both the email admins at Wharton as well as Penn web admins. Fortunately, neither happened, so I guess the whole thing wasn’t nearly the cataclysmic event it felt like at the time.

From now on, I’ll make sure I’m not developing using an error handler meant for production. Not smart.