Tech Whining Begins Now...
Posted Sep 7, 2025 - 21:17:29

---

So my personal site, which has been around in one form or another since 1996, has been running on Perl since 2001. Especially this blog.

And lately my webhost has been shitting the bed with Perl scripts. Like random 500 errors will just kick up on scripts that otherwise work. The problem is not my code (which I maintain and normally runs fine), but something that's intermittently happening on my webhost's end.

And support is just awful.

I've cycled through half a dozen support techs. Initially it took me forever to find one who would believe me when I said I was talking about Perl and not PHP. Then I found someone who saw the problem, and asked me to document instances of it happening, and acknowledged my code was not at fault -- but then I got cycled to ANOTHER tech, and this one thinks it's my code not serving headers.

Which it is.

And this guy just doesn't know what he's talking about. It's not as easy as just finding a new webhost either -- a lot of hosts don't support Perl anymore. So now I think my only solution is to recode my whole site to run in PHP -- either to stay with my current webhost or to move to a new one.

Which sucks, because I don't know PHP anywhere near as well as I know Perl.

So now I'm stuck googling functions, figuring out shit in a language I only kinda know. I've gotten one script done, and I'm just going to have to build a whole parallel version of my site in PHP and launch it when I'm done. But if you get random 500 errors on my site, that's what's happening.

Just hit reload in a few minutes I guess, and it'll come back.
- Traegorn