Black Friday sales at JapanesePod101 this November up to 51% OFF!
JapanesePod101.com

Blog / October 2023

  • 22 October 2023Fixed the Contact form

    A small live update today fixes the issue with the Contact form I wrote about earlier.

    I'd love to say this is a humbling bug - but it really is a very stupid mistake - which caused the contact form to silently stop working throughout the summer!

    What happened is I was working on a separate branch to experiment with SMTP email sending via GMail. As part of the changes I updated the way the emails are formatted in the private config files. Since the private config is not part of the public repository, it is not versioned. When I switched back to the "main" branch, the configuration maintained these changes while the rest of the code did not include them - this caused the php mail() function to receive incorrect sender name/email.

    Fortunately this bug didn't prevent the account related emails from being sent, althought they would show up as coming from "K@gator1234.hostgator.com" or something like that... which doesn't look great for the user since there is no indication of the Kanji Koohii domain.

    On the plus side I finally merged some of the changes that I'll need if I manage to add SMTP email.

    I want to apologize to anyone who's taken time to send Feedback, perhaps some kind words, or even needed help with their account! I did not mean to be rude, I simply did not receive any emails at all coming from the Contact page over the entire summer!

    This issue is now fixed. I double checked that I indeed receive the emails.... at long last.

    I'll probably end up adding the email address to the Contact page for users who would rather use their own email client. The contact email is pretty easy to remember, it is similar to the website's url: kanji (dot) koohii (at) gmail (dot) com.

  • 9 October 2023October sale at JapanesePod101 & other tidbits

    This month's sale at JapanesePod101 is called "Monster Sale". Check out their Plans & Pricing Page if you'd like to know the difference between Basic, Premium and Premium PLUS plans - as well as what comes with the free signup.

    Note there should be a Black Friday sale sometime in November if you're willing to hold off. Going by previous years it has been 51% OFF. In December there should be JapanesePod101's once-a-year Holiday Countdown as well, which typically included a 55% OFF sale but please note this was for a 24-Month plan.

    Cheers to another year of Koohii!

    In other news the domain name was renewed this summer. Holy cow, time flies!

    dasdasd

    Thank you all for the support over the years! Thanks to our patrons and everyone who's helped motivate me and contributed to keep this little website afloat for yourself and for others!

    Challenges

    I am sorry for the lack of news. I won't lie it's been really challenging throughout the summer. The neighborhood is just no longer somewhere I want to be, and it's been really taxing on my ability to focus and work. I've always struggled with anxiety, and the irony is since starting therapy it seems everything is upside down and even worse than before. That said there's the saying "gets worse before it gets better"... hopefully that turns out to be true.

    Just being honest that I don't expect to be able to make major updates to the site - but hopefully with the quieter winter months I hope I can dive into the code and make some QOL changes.

    Most importantly I wanted to say despite the lack of news - no worries I'm here! The site is not going anywhere so long as I have your support!

    Contact form seems to be broken

    It's been really weird on my end because I'm receiving almost no emails for months now. Once in a while I would try the Contact form and would receive the email so I figured maybe it's just really quiet out there... but now I tried again and do NOT see my email. So hmm.

    Maybe I should work on that soon. I looked into sending mail with Google SMTP. XOauth2 was a major PITA but it sounds like with enabled 2FA on the Gmail account I would be able to use a simpler password based method. I will look into that soon.

    So if you haven't received a reply from me recently I am really sorry. I am hesitant to put the email address here even in "dot com" speak because spam bots are increasingly annoying. For any site-related issues you can always reach me at github with a free github account.

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