Rebuilding dor.ky

This site runs on Statamic with every piece of content in MySQL rather than flat files, and four importers keeping the moving parts current: Strava activities, parkrun results, Packagist download counts and Goodreads shelves. ## Why the database The flat file default is the reason most people pick Statamic, and it is the right call for a site one person edits from one machine. It stopped being the right call here the moment scheduled importers started writing content: a cron job writing YAML into a git working copy is a merge conflict waiting for a deploy to collide with it. Moving entries, users, taxonomies and globals to the Eloquent driver made writes ordinary. An importer inserts a row, the site reads it, and a deploy touches neither. ## What the importers do Each one is a self contained addon: its own migration, model, command and Antlers tag, scheduled from its own service provider. They share nothing but a notifier. The Strava one is the awkward one, because Strava's activity list returns a summary and the interesting parts live one request deeper. It works a queue of fifty a run, newest first, so a new activity is detailed within the hour while nineteen hundred historical ones fill in behind it at whatever the daily quota allows. ## The part worth stealing Every importer stops cleanly when it hits a rate limit and exits successfully. A quota stop is the thing pacing itself, not a failure, and treating it as an error would have meant an alert every hour until the window rolled over. That distinction, between a job that failed and a job that is waiting, is most of what makes scheduled work quiet enough to leave alone.