This weeknotes has been in my drafts for a few weeks now. It only takes getting busy at work, for writing weeknotes to fall off the radar. I need to find a way of fitting this into my routine.

Updates

The new version of this website is live, it has been rebuilt using a static site generator, Eleventy. It's the same design with minor tweaks, but this update was mainly about the underlying structure - moving away from PHP and PerchCMS to Nunjucks and NetlifyCMS, as well as hosting it on Netlify.

I had to manually copy over all my blog posts and notes as I couldn't figure out a way to export them from Perch. It wasn't too bad as I didn't have that many blog posts. The plan was to convert the RSS feed to static HTML and then use that as the start for the new static site pages - that's when I realised my RSS feed wasn't showing full page content, just the excerpt but I couldn't get the PHP template to output the full content in the end.

The last few weeks leading up to the release of the website I was doing a lot of minor fixes to get the site ready to go live - this meant I didn't have any spare time to write on my blog.

I had to figure out a few issues:

  • Netlify redirects - figured out how to do redirects in the end
  • Amp redirects - got rid of amp articles from my site - I only implemented this to figure out how to do them with Perch in case a customer asked for them
  • Netlify form gotchas - added honeypot, but forgot to add the netlify specific data attribute to the <form> itself, also helps if the form action is called action= - for some reason I had it set to path=
  • If you've added content to your site on Netlify, via NetlifyCMS before you added a custom domain, you won't be able to log into NetlifyCMS until you republish your website - see https://community.netlify.com/t/netlifycms-on-custom-domain/2808/2?u=juanfernandes
  • Had some fun figuring out how to move my site to Netlify but keep email hosting with my host, Guru - got there in the end with some help from Guru support.

While I've been working on the rebuild of my website I have been following a proper git workflow, as in having issues in Gitlab, creating a branch for that issue, working on it and then merging that to master - instead of working directly on master, as I have done in the past with personal projects.

Now that my site gets published automatically via GIT and Netlify, and the site is live, I'm changing my git workflow a bit to include a develop branch. I will take new feature branches from develop, then merge them back to develop.

Posting via NetlifyCMS builds my site from master which means it automatically deploys it, anything else, like code changes, will get merged into develop first, create a preview and then will get merged into master for the weekly releases.

What's next?

I have a bunch of design issues in Gitlab that I will working my way through. Again, the design won't change much, but I want to remove my custom grid and start using CSS Grid Layout and also Flexbox to improve my layouts.

I really need to nail down a routine for creating more content on here, especially blog posts as I haven't published any for a while. I also want to get back to posting weekly notes.

Reading

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