I’m still way behind with weeknotes – partly I’m still dealing with the fallout of some big emergency hosting and support stuff that came in, but also I’ve been ill with a cold that went on for WEEKS, and both my kids had a sickness bug. Sometimes, life just gets in the way of creativity.
So here’s the first of two parts of a 4-week catchup.
Projects: what I’ve been up to
I’m still working my charity microsite build. I’ve also been working on:
- continued modifications to a website that I look after for a national charity
- final tweaks to a small database and data-importer that was being built into a WordPress site that I look after
- more dealing with a client site that got a proper, targetted DDoS attack. The clean-up and fall-out from that has taken a while as we have restored the hosting setup and ensured the site is protected in future.
I’ve also been thinking a LOT about future work, if and how to turn side-projects into products, and how to shape my business in the year to come.
Posts: things I made
- Tech Note: Checking the integrity of npm modules: This was a little something I discovered while reviewing an automatic security patch on a GitHub project. Worth jotting down for future reference.
This week I learned
WordPress 5.2 has a feature that emails the admin email address of a site when a PHP error occurs. I’m often invited to help people change or mend broken websites, and when I’m doing work of this sort, it’s useful to see the error messages that get sent. But changing the admin email address is tricky because you have to confirm it when it changes, and this would be additional and unwanted work for the client I’m working for.
However, this week I learned that you can change the email address without modifying the site admin address. A comment on the post announcing the feature tells you how.
Toolbox
I’ve just finished my accounts and so I thought I’d mention that I use FreeAgent for my accounting. It’s super software – fast, responsive, feature packed. It does bookkeeping, accounts preparation, tax returns, invoicing, time-tracking, payroll, P60’s and a whole load of other things.
It’s fairly expensive, but worth it. And I get it free anyway through a NatWest business bank account – it was worth the pain of doing the bank account switch just to save the money on the FreeAgent account!
I don’t use all the features. But the at-a-glance overview of how my business is money-wise is really incredibly helpful. Worth checking out of you run your own business and want a decent way to manage the finances.
Time Machine
There was a thing online recently where someone had discovered a bash/terminal/command line shortcut for moving the cursor to the start or end of the line. Things like this often fall into the category of “things you don’t know you don’t know”. So here’s a super collection of Tweets that I collated a while back from @climagic with some super-helpful command-line shortcuts.
Pins: things I read and remembered
Here’s what I bookmarked these two weeks:
(Brought to you with pinboard.in and my Sync Pinboard plugin)
- The React Handbook – Free Learn React eBook – claims to teach you 80% of what you need to know in 20% of the time.
- The link between stress and depression … and the 10 simple words that could help | Society | The Guardian – Excellent read with some science and practical tips on stress and depression
- WIP – Interesting maker community with public goals/tasks and accountability.
- Otter Voice Meeting Notes – Otter.ai – Audio transcription app/service for meeting notes – can’t think I would want a WHOLE meeting transcribed, but could be useful
- Design+Code – Learn to design and code React and Swift apps – Code Courses I’ve not seen before
- Minimal Google Analytics Snippet | Minimal Analytics – Minimal, simple, cookie-free, Google Analytics snippet. Will it work in the long term? Does it give you all of GA’s metrics?
Have a great week!