Dealing with the PHPocalypse

So this website is old as heck. I think some folks who are stopping by might not realize that. I launched it in 1996, and started this blog in 2001. So, y'know, thirty and twenty-five years respectively. Because of that, this site has gone through a lot of different stuff on the backend. While it's true that until last year a lot of it was still Perl instead of PHP, I've been running PHP code on parts of the site since the mid-2000s. And unlike the new scripts I wrote last year to replace the public facing Perl scripts, the old PHP files weren't exactly up to date. Which is why this site, until yesterday, was operating on PHP 7.4. And that was not the worst thing in the world. Frankly, secretly I'd still been running PHP 4 until just a few years ago. I figured I'd get the site working on PHP 8 sooner or later, but I wasn't in a rush. PHP 7.4 wasn't a vulnerable version of the language as far as I knew. Uh, that kind of changed this week. Only PHP versions 8.2 and newer were getting…