Well, phew! The snow melted quickly and we got straight into the first week of the new routine. Though it turns out there is no such thing as a “normal” week in our family.
Work-wise some small projects have been nudged along and I’ve had interesting conversations about some new ones.
Projects: what I’ve been up to
- Specs for the new Laravel project progressed and draft proposal was made. I need to work up the final proposal still but then we should get going quickly, I hope.
- There were quite a lot of calls about new things, large and small! There are two projects on the go which are squeezing databases of stuff into WordPress. I had a play with AirTable to see if that would fit well but their API – though clever – is quite limited.
- I spent more time on complicated slug/URL/redirect issues – this was really tricky, but I think we’ve nailed it now.
- I did some work on a small charity’s site, making some changes for them and trying to work out why WordPress wouldn’t do automatic security updates. This site was built by a big design agency using Bedrock (or some kind of fork of it), which is total overkill for something this size. Bedrock is a composer-based WordPress environment where updates are all manual so someone needs to update it. But the agency then seems to have uploaded this site to a server and left it to get old. Extracting this site from Bedrock to make it easier to manage has been a challenge and this week I learned that WordPress prevents auto-updates if there is a
.gitfolder/directory that makes it look like WordPress is version controlled. ARGH! - I had a REALLY interesting call about a REALLY interesting future project that may or may not happen.
- I had a stupid idea and this lead me to start some initial work on a new theme for my personal website.
Posts: things I made
- Nothing posted last week. But here’s an old post about the character trait of High Sensitivity that might be illuminating for some: “Highly Sensitive“
Pins: things I read and remembered
- Moving from Go to PHP again – Danny moved from Laravel to Go, but has now gone back to PHP in the form of Symfony. I’m wanting to learn Go, so I guess I’ll be here in about two year’s time!
- Slim SEO – Interesting-looking lightweight SEO plugin for WordPress that came recommended
- unglud/dusker – A stand alone Laravel Dusk test suit, which does not require Laravel framework itself. This was mentioned at the Bristol WordPress people meetup this week
- You Can Change the World!: Everyday Teen Heroes Who Dare to Make a Difference – Interesting-looking book to inspire your kids to change the world!
- hover CSS media query – Someone on Twitter pointed out that you can do a CSS media query to see if hover-ability is present. Useful!
- Open Broadcaster Software – I’ve been looking at eCamm Live for some live streaming I may want to do in the future, but this seems to be an open source alternative!
- What Creative Coaches want you to know – I don’t normally go for this kind of career coaching article, but this is good and relevant to me this week, and has some nice “homework” at the end to get you thinking.
- CrossFit and SoulCycle are becoming “churches” for millennials – Slightly random, but this is an interesting article that looks at how fitness classes are like religious services: gathering with a shared purpose, music, a “liturgy” or “ritual”. Wherever you get it, community is important.
Have a great week!