Also a Google-generated image!

You will have noted over the last months – actually, since the middle of last year – that updates here have been infrequent/sporadic.

My age may have something to do with that – newly 64 🙂 – but it’s also been down to something called PHP !!

PHP is the programming language used by the servers that ‘serve’ you internet pages. This same PHP was in the news in the last couple of weeks as ‘vulnerabilities’ were uncovered by AI (agents?) which brought thousands of sites (mine included) offline for around 24 hours whilst updates against said vulnerabilities were made to servers around the world. That is/was not the only issue with PHP.

The other issue with PHP is that it is constantly updated – so old versions get superseded. This version of Burgundy Report has been online since about 2016 and some parts relied on a now no-longer-supported version of PHP. That’s not a problem for you – but it was a problem for me, as there were particular moments when older versions of this software broke my site.

On an hourly-rate basis, it’s been quite expensive for agencies to modify the site because all the constituent parts are bundled together to serve its pages. For quite a while now, I’ve been out of the loop on how to make fixes.

Since the middle of this year, my posting has been much less, as I’ve been too involved with agencies (instead of content) whose (eventual) response was always that they can’t guarantee a fix unless they build a whole new site for at least 10,000 (choose your currency).

Today I bit the bullet and made the fix myself – well, sort of myself 🙂 I told Claude Code what needed fixing and Claude Code fixed it. It took me (Claude!) a few hours today and everything seems stable – though please let me know if you see any issues. Over the next two weeks, there are a few more tweaks to make to get me ahead of the curve on PHP upgrades, so it’s not all done – but certainly it was a big step today.

So next will be more about wines – without AI 🙂