Refactoring announce.php Into a Class (And the Bug That Came With It)

Same Logic, New Wrapper

Took the procedural version and wrapped it in a single class, BlogPostAnnouncer, mostly to get everything under one namespace instead of leaving the functions floating in the global namespace next to whatever else PHP has lying around. main() became BlogPostAnnouncer::main($argv), called once at the bottom of the file. Every other function moved inside the class body more or less copy-pasted, unchanged.

The Bug I Didn't Notice Until I Actually Ran It

That "more or less copy-pasted" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Inside a class, an unqualified call like parse_frontmatter($raw) doesn't resolve to a sibling method the way it resolved to a global function before — PHP goes looking for a global function named parse_frontmatter, doesn't find one, and throws a fatal error instead. main() is the only method I remembered to mark static, and none of the calls inside it use self:: or static:: to reach the others. Every method in the class calls its siblings the same bare way that used to be correct in the procedural version and is now wrong.

I didn't catch this reading the diff. I caught it by actually running the script and watching it die on the very first function call it made.

The Fix Is One Keyword, Repeated Everywhere

The fix is mechanical: self::parse_frontmatter(…) instead of parse_frontmatter(…), for every call, in every method. I know exactly what's wrong and haven't pushed the fix yet, because the procedural version still runs everything for real right now — nothing's actually blocked. That's the upside of not deleting v1 the moment v2 exists: the working thing keeps working while the new thing gets to sit there being wrong for a while without costing me anything.

What the Refactor Was Actually For

Honestly, mostly readability. "These functions all belong to this one tool" is a small thing to formalize on a script this size — I could've prefixed every function announcer_parse_frontmatter and gotten the same grouping for free without any of this. The real reason was I wanted the practice: reaching for a class deliberately, on something small enough that getting it wrong costs me an afternoon of debugging and not a production incident.