18th March 2019 – 24th March 2019

A week of feeling rough and juggling projects, with too much Brexit news in the mix.

Client work

Client work was slow as I was feeling rough and tired all week with a low level cold. There wasn’t anything particularly interesting to talk about – fixes to bits of a Twitter integration for a client, checking Laura’s work with Google Cloud Talent Solution for another client, and checking whether it was worth putting Cloudflare in front of the site.

I finally got access to my client’s new server… almost. They have a new server, but actually getting at it is being a frustrating set of roadblocks. When they got their first server from Host My Site, we received a document listing how to access the site. Now they’re owned by Hosting.com we get details in a web based dashboard, which don’t actually list what to do with them, and after a lot of faff so far I have some VPN software that works in Windows but not OSX, and still no knowledge on how to get to the web server itself. Highly frustrating given they are not a cheap service. I’ve got outstanding requests with their support which will hopefully be answered tomorrow. I will be delighted if it turns out I’ve missed something obvious from their support section.

On the Cloudflare front… I’ve set up two domains pointing to a test site of the client’s site, one using Cloudflare and the other not so I can benchmark response times between using Cloudflare and their standard setup. We get a very small benefit if using Cloudflare, but very little as the site uses Cookies and if you do that, Cloudflare doesn’t cache the HTML page itself. It does cache the static assets (image and Javascript in this case) but we already have those on long browser cache times so don’t get a great benefit from also being on the Cloudflare Content Delivery Network (CDN.)

Happily, Cloudflare have a generous free version so this testing has just cost some time. I’ve got a couple more things to check, but I don’t think we’ll need it for this particular project.

My projects

I host my friend Richard’s blog, and it had broken on the hosting I had it on. I’d been meaning to move it off, and this was a good time to do it. It hit a problem when I moved it to some of my Cloudways hosting where WordPress, the software it was running on, wouldn’t update itself. Working out how to fix that also lead to me fixing it on my own site, which I wrote up here.

So, Weeknotes 9 finally get a photo of my son at his air rifle shooting competition.

Otherwise – a little work on Farm things but no where near enough on my own projects.

Productivity

Badly hit by feeling rubbish, and far too much Brexit news which triggered some interesting conversations at The Skiff, but were not good for focus. My hip pain was variable but seems to be getting better now with a mix of walking and physiotherapy exercises.

I ended up working half of Saturday to catch up due to low work rate and juggling family things. I hate working at the weekend but am getting pushed in to it with Katie’s shifts being bad for business at the moment.

Learning

Very little time on 30×500 this week, although some time on building up content for the Farm using it’s teachings. Need to get back on this horse next week.

The Farm

We shifted to the Evening Star pub this week as our usual venue the Caxton Arms had a charity pub quiz on taking up the whole pub. It made a nice change, and I got a lift so was able to have some of their lovely Dark Star beer.

There were 17 of us at the meeting this week. My notes on what was talked about…

• Laravel App Containers – good idea or not?
• PHP-Slow log
• Moving a site from Laravel 4 to 5
• Debugging Laravel
• Rush rates
• Structuring your work to fit in other work
• Apollopad writing (web) app
• NanoWriMo
• Bookcrossing
• Finding time for non-client work
• Scrivener – good or bad?
• Marketing problems
• 30×500
• Oat beer – no enzymes so how does it work?
• Brexit mayhem
• Cloudflare not making much difference – good sign or not?

I had a nice catch up with Dave Child from Readable.com about what to do with the bootstrapping group I’ve lapsed on running, and about business in general. A lot of this week’s Farm was talking about clients or projects I’m involved with, which was fine but I missed some of the more relaxing side of the event.

Family

Some helping son with making a space themed game, which Katie put a lot of effort in to both on the getting a nine year old to do something front and organising the building of it. We shifted Mother’s Day to this weekend as Katie will be working the day itself.

Reading: I gave up on The Powerbook and took it back to the library. I’ve started Ancillary Mercy by Anne Leckie, the third part of her Imperial Radch trilogy. It’s started well and page count-wise I’ve read as much in 3-4 days as I did in a few weeks of reading Powerbook.

Writing with: A Zebra Z-Grip Max gel pen. Great on the right paper, but it’s unfortunately scratchy on some including the Fabriano pad I leave at The Skiff. I think this is due to it being old and the gel ink starting to degrade a bit. I’ve a few left of this discontinued pen so I hope the others are in better condition as it’s a lovely pen when it works.