Client work

There were some bread and butter bug fixes and changes to parts of some client sites, but the week was dominated by domain transfers.

For one of my long term clients I’d ended up with a dozen of their domains in my domain registrar account, mainly .co domains as their registrar did not support them when they first came out. These are expensive domains to rent and I’d complained about having to renew them each year then have to wait to be paid back. Another freelancer involved with the company also had some domains in his registrar too. So, I was asked to transfer all of them over to the now updated client’s Ionos (previously 1&1) account.

This was relatively straightforward, being mainly clicking around various bits of multiple web based control panels. But it took a while as there were 30 or so domains to move, and the process is slightly different for .uk domains compared to everything else.

It took a few days for the .co domains to move, and when domains move their DNS disappears so I had to re-set up each domain to point to the client’s server. Again, not tricky once you know how, just a lot of clicking and keeping track of what’s transferred and set up and what hasn’t.

I don’t transfer domains very often and the process seemed easier than when I’ve done it in the past – you need various codes and things, but both registrars had simple procedures for them and weren’t trying to hide anything.

My Projects

I managed quite a lot of writing for the Farm site, with one article going live on How to make a freelancers invoice and chunks of several others written or in notes form.

Also on the cards was an upgrade to the WordPress install that the Farm site runs on. Haze, who built this version of the site, offered to be around when I did the upgrade just in case anything went wrong, but I did it without him and nothing did. We had a little stutter on some pages as I hadn’t realised the Advanced Content Fields plugin needed a button pressed to update the database, but that was it. All very smooth and a testiment to Haze’s site building skills.

Productivity

Pretty good to start the week, then got lower near the end after a bad night and low motivation due to having to chase money, again, from one of my clients.

Being cheesed off by the money chasing provided some useful motivation for getting on with the content for the Farm site, and pushing towards finding something to earn income outside of client consultancy work.

Learning

Some progress on 30×500, continuing to learn about the slightly more advanced parts of the content marketing they suggest.

The Farm

Attendance down at 14, but the chat was very good. As usual it was at the Caxton Arms. My notes were…

• Tomato plant horticulture
• Finding out if your potential app has a market
• Problems buying/selling houses
• Vue.js
• Lobsters regrow their claws
• Domain moving
• Greenfield projects let you use new tech easily
• Learning a new tech properly by doing a project with it
• Carsitting
• Getting plumbing fixed
• The Skiff coworking space
• New to freelancing
• Revolt Bitcoin wallet
• To do app for chidlren’s chores
• Refactoring and fixing a large Backbone project
• The Farm acting as an old boys network
• Diving
• GraphQL / Grapher
• Scala and Slick functional relationship mapper
• Worthing Wheel
• Kevin’s found skull fragment resolved
• Strange finds (including exuviae)
• Finding time for your own projects

Family

Nothing unusual, just the standard playground and family visits.

Reading: Started Titan by John Varley, which I hadn’t taken in was part of a series. Started well, not a lot to report as I’m not making great progress as I’m falling asleep so fast at the moment.

Writing with: a Zebra Z-mulsion pen, nice and smooth but a little smeary if you’re not careful with it.