This reduces chances of errors where consumers of strings mutate inputs
and reduces memory usage of the app.
Test suite passes now, but there may be some stuff left, so we will run
a few sites on a branch prior to merging
* `rescue nil` is a really bad pattern to use in our code base.
We should rescue errors that we expect the code to throw and
not rescue everything because we're unsure of what errors the
code would throw. This would reduce the amount of pain we face
when debugging why something isn't working as expexted. I've
been bitten countless of times by errors being swallowed as a
result during debugging sessions.
