Day 2 of the Blacklight Soft Launch — What Actually Happened

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Day 2 of the Blacklight Soft Launch — What Actually Happened

 

I thought day 2 would be blog posts and feature writeups. It was not.

Here’s what actually happened when I sat down this morning and opened the error log.

The error log roasted me

Xserver — my hosting provider — has a diagnostic tool that emails you a summary of PHP errors on your site. I opened it expecting nothing. What I got was a list of database errors I didn’t know existed.

Four tables in the plugin were missing columns. The code expected them, the database didn’t have them, and WordPress was swallowing the errors silently. Nothing was visibly broken from the outside, but underneath the plugin was throwing database errors on almost every page load.

Good news: found them. Fixed them. The plugin is cleaner for it.

The BOM mystery

A BOM — Byte Order Mark — is an invisible character that sometimes gets added to the start of a file or HTTP response. It’s harmless in most contexts. In JSON responses it’s catastrophic because it breaks the parser before it even reads the first character.

Somewhere between PHP and the browser, my hosting server was injecting a BOM into every REST API response. This meant that when WordPress tried to check for plugin updates, it was getting back what looked like corrupted JSON and giving up silently.

Three hours. That’s how long it took to isolate, confirm, and determine it was a server-level issue rather than anything in the code. The fix is a support ticket to Xserver. Still waiting on that one.

What actually got shipped

Despite the chaos, day 2 shipped a lot:

  • Page caching enabled — WP Super Cache on Apache, homepage load times should drop significantly
  • Purchase flow end-to-end verified — claim page, Stripe webhook, license assignment, plugin download link
  • Pulse beacon confirmed firing and recording real visitor data
  • 4 missing database columns added across the anomaly engine, crawlmap, linkmap and search index tables
  • Dashboard tile bugs fixed — anomaly counts, freshness splits, Top Posts data
  • v1.0.6 staged and ready to deploy

The honest take

Soft launching before everything is perfect is the right call. Every bug found today is a bug that won’t hit a paying customer. The error log that roasted me this morning is exactly the kind of feedback that makes the product better.

Day 3 is blog posts and feature writeups. Probably.

Here is a link to the latest update list. These are what led to my woes.

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