This weeknotes is late again due to having a weekend without being in front of a screen, most of it - my youngest child had been begging me to jump on the Minecraft server so we could play together. This week was my last with DXW and DfE (only 2 days) and the rest of the week was spent working on my own website and on my freelance project.

Work

Very short week as I only worked two days - my last with the Department for Education as my replacement is now settled in and up to speed with the project.

Had the rest of the week off as my new contract starts next week.

Personal

Being off work meant I could do some more work on my own website as I convert it to a static site.

Got quite a few 'issues' closed this week which means my converted website is nearly ready to go live! The hardest thing about this project has been holding myself back on fixing everything - but I need to concentrate on getting all the pages converted from PHP to nunjucks and onto eleventy first.

This week I created a bunch of 301 redirects - nothing groundbreaking but just learning how to do these with Netlify. Finished converting existing work projects to nunjucks.

Updated the code on the contact form to use Netlify forms - because its a static website, there isn't PHP or anything else running on the server to process form submissions - so we'll use Netlify's magic for this.

Video/stream

I also decided that it was about time I tested the waters with recording myself coding and talking about what I was doing - I didn't quite have the confidence to do a live stream, so I opted to record it and then watch it back. There are a few things I need to improve - but overall it wasn't a bad first attempt.

Thanks to Ross @magicroundabout for inspiring me to get on and do it, after watching his stream.

Freelance

Nearly there with my e-commerce website project. The client has started to test the website and has started asking questions and has finally started putting together a list of products. Both of these, I needed them to have started a lot sooner, but this didn't happen.

This week I finished off quite a few minor, but important things. I added a way of showing product variations - think different sizes if the product was an item of clothing - the client may never need this, but I didn't want them to need it and it not being there for them to use.

Worked out how to pass a bit more information to Stripe, so that in the dashboard the client will have more information about the customer and the order.

As much as we all agree that image sliders are useless, I do think that they can be useful in some situations and having one on the product details page I believe makes sense.

Lastly, I added a login/register link to the header on all pages. One of the websites new features is to have paid members - so I needed a way to make it easier for members to log in wherever they landed on the website - but I didn't want to add another icon to the header and didn't want to add another menu item - as there are already too many.

So I decided to use add a links section above the header. If a member is already signed in, they will see a link to the members' area - where they have access to their digital purchases and other files.

Reading

Weeknotes

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