Dear Homeschooling Friends,

I've made more fixes to Apricot Pie, and now it is stable.

There were two main issues I needed to fix.

First, there is a table in the database that stores a record every time someone visits a page on the site.  This table would fill up very quickly because there are a lot of bots that visit (or should I say, repeatedly hammer) the site (not sure why... maybe ApricotPie.com is an important domain!), and this would cause the server hard drive to fill up and crash the site.  I fixed this issue by writing a script that executes every 15 minutes to empty the table in the database to keep the disk space free.

Second, the site had no SSL certificate... which basically means that, depending on your browser, it would either give you a warning that the site was "insecure", or block the site with a small link to bypass the block.  I figured out how to generate a certificate, so now that issue is also fixed!

Between being completely down, and afterward still experiencing a lot of crashes, ApricotPie has been more or less out for over a year.  I deeply regret not getting all these issues fixed sooner.  I know the site being down for so long has more or less done something to the connection we all had on this site... frozen, hibernated, smothered... but I hope it hasn't withered it altogether, and I do hope to see you all posting on the site again soon.

Grace to you,
— James Dunn