7th January 2019 – 13th January 2019

Inspired by Clive, Simon and Graham, I’m trying writing some weeknotes to record what I’ve been doing recently.

Client work

Built a newsletter and set up a drip feed of the monthly news out over a couple of social networks for one client, then most of the week was swamped by an ongoing problem for another two clients, who are in the same group. Their websites have been failing briefly for a week or so and all log hunting and optimisation measures came to naught.

As part of ongoing changes to try to improve things, I decided we should get on and move the sites up to PHP 7.2 as they were still on 5.6, which has just gone out of support. This also meant moving (virtual) server and while the host has a ‘clone’ tool which would copy the sites between servers… except it wouldn’t if I’d used their “one click install” to put WordPress or a framework in place. Queue the manual move of a six sites, some of medium complexity.

Added to this: a few meetings, two days at the coworking space I use, and lots of communication with Laura, who does a lot of work for some of my clients with me.

Farm

My freelancers networking group started meeting again on Wednesday, as we will every Wednesday through to Christmas. About 20 people came along, with three newbies, which is good for January as a lot of people doing “dry January” don’t come to the pub for fear of lapsing. I wasn’t drinking, but that was because I was driving.

My own project work

I wanted to spend a day of work on my own projects this week, which is mainly building a Google Ads tool, but also moving a bunch of sites from a friend’s hosting to elsewhere as he’s shutting down the last of his servers. No decent work was done on these as I was juggling server problems or life.

I’ve also been failing at writing up a blog post about being Skiff ‘Captain’, hopefully I’ll finish that next week.

Home life

Katie started a new job just before Christmas, and juggling caring for our son has become a lot more complicated now she’s also busy with work. School term restarting has helped, but I’m not putting enough time in to this at the moment and I seem to be constantly behind.

Watching: Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets – in chunks.

Reading: Metropolitan by Walter Jon Williams. ¾ of the way through, second read but it’s been 20 years so a lot of the detail had disappeared. It’s very, very good, which is the bit I did remember.

Writing with: mainly a Zebra Z Grip Max (older v1 solid black version) – I’m trying to use up a lot of the pens I already own this year, hence mentioning it at all. The Z Grip Max is variable, some of the ones I’ve had have been great, this one is a bit scratchy unless the paper is very smooth, then it’s great.

Writing in: a Lemome A5 notebook with dot grid. It’s got a hardback cover of cork, and is being very nice so far. That’ll be with me at least a couple of months.