PHP and Story Submission

Some computer issues here meant that the PHP compiler on our computer got updated.  It was probably eight years old, at least.  

When I fired up my local story submission tracker, it created an empty report.  Luckily, I had Duotrope to fall back on.  I love Duotrope, but one feature it doesn't have is a market suggestion feature, which my home-grown PHP script does have.  Not to mention, it's always nice to have a back-up of what I'm doing that's not in the cloud.

It turned out that there were changes to several PHP calls.  The first one was how files were read into arrays.  I have three files--stories, mailcall, and markets--which I use to track which finished stories have been sent to which markets.  The second changes were to how the mktime and date functions worked.  Luckily, using a set time zone function fixed those; and then I had to fiddle with a how a market close date was trimmed (or in this case, how it shouldn't be trimmed anymore).  

Now the programs are working, and I don't have to think too hard about if I've sent a story to a market previously, or which new story might be a good fit (is within word counts, is the right genre) for a particular market.  

And... submit!