Yes, the good old chain of events where something sounding simple starts and things take on a life of their own. I received an email a while back from Google letting me know that they were no longer going to allow authentication to their mail servers using an ID and password. This impacts the weekly email that is sent from this site and some other functions. Simple, just change to Oauth 2.0 and you're good, right?
In order to use Oauth 2.0 I need to update my mail program (PHPMailer) ...
... in order to use PHPMailer with Google, I need to implement SSL and turn on https with Apache ...
... in order to turn on https with Apache I needed to upgrade my entire stack (WAMP) because somehow the ssl_module on the version I had wasn't working. Assume it wasn't compiled right as there were several posts from folks having a similar problem ...
... upgrading is always fun as there's a bunch of functions that have depricated since I wrote my code, so that means re-writing a lot of the backend code for the site ...
... before installing and rewriting code, need to take a backup ... my NAS fried, so I had to get a new one ...
... ok, so I got a new super duper NAS and it came with loads of bells and whistles, so I did get quite sidetracked with that. It comes with a streaming functionality, so you can stream to it and it will record the stream and then restream out to any number of RTMP services. Right now I have it setup to stream out to Twitch, YouTube and Facebook. There's literally no reason for me to do this other than the fact that I can. And sometimes, that's the best reason of them all :) ...
... sidetracking done and back to the task at hand, backup website, installed new software, install composer to get new PHPMailer, install certbot so I can get SSL certificate from
Let's Encrypt which is great as it provides free certificates and free is good, particularly to a project website like this that is not monetized ...
.. infrastructure in place, do some tidy up and recode parts of the website not working. Bit of a note here, there's still some, but it's not related to this. There's a flash plugin used on one page that I need to update when I get time, but where does one get time once you're a megastar streaming to absolutely nobody on three platforms?
All in all, a huge amount of fun as it's been a while since I've done anything with the site and even though visitors won't notice the difference, I do.
