Blimey, what a week! We’re about to start a whole new routine with my youngest starting pre-school and doing more hours there than she was in nursery, my wife taking on an extra half day and me…am I working more or just moving hours around? I can’t tell. Anyway, it’s crazy, and it starts today.
Last week’s snow messed things up a little with a school closure on Friday too.
Projects: what I’ve been up to
- Still reviewing spec’s and working up a proposal for a new Laravel project. Keen to get going on this one if I can.
- Finally got a long-outstanding, but really small project for a friend-of-a-friend live. It’s a couple of pages in a WordPress page-builder but has just been hanging around for so long. Smaller projects with no deadline often get put back and back. I’m going to try and stop taking them on.
- More helping my friends at Hands Up with last minute project snags on a custom WordPress build. There’s been some tricky issues with redirects that have been pretty hard to debug.
- Another small, slow-burning project has had some good progress and I met the client this week to talk them through. They’re really happy with things and we have just a few final tasks to get through before we may be able to “go live”! It was wonderful seeing them use what I made and enjoying the benefits the re-work of their old website has brought.
- Helping a client fix some SPF records to fix outgoing mail. SPF comes up SO often. I’m sure many have documented it, but I need to write my own guide.
Posts: things I made
- Improving internal communications – it’s a people problem…: This was a comment in a Facebook group that was blog-post worthy once tidied up a bit. My tips and tools, experience and wisdom for internal comms. Applies to many forms of online community building too.
- Opinion: WordPress Gutenberg and the responsibility of owning a website: I heard something on a podcast that got me thinking about who the WordPress Gutenberg project is really for. Some thoughts an opinions on that topic.
Pins: things I read and remembered
- Enpass – a great value password manager I’ve not come across before
- Insomnia REST Client – an HTTP/REST API client, a bit like Postman, but different
- Flarum – New (PHP) forum software that was recommended to me at some point recently
- ServerPilot: How to change the version of the PHP command – I found out one of my ServerPilot-managed boxes was running an old version of PHP on the command line, so this is how to change it!
- Tom McFarlin’s Practical WordPress Development Podcast – Excellent new podcast from Tom, who is a knowledgeable and respected developer in the WordPress community
- Understanding API-Based Platforms: A Guide For Product Managers — Smashing Magazine – I’ve not read through it all, but this looks like a great primer on API’s.
- Satis – static Composer repository generator – There was some chat in a WordPress Slack workspace this week about using Composer for your own plugins and themes, I’d not heard of Satis, but seems you can use it to make your own Composer repositories of stuff. See also…
- Satispress – which exposes installed WordPress plugins and themes as Composer packages. With thanks to Iain who kindly explained this all to me!
Have a great week!