Weeknotes

Boo!

‘Tis the season where my child wants me to be some advanced cosplay outfit maker. I admit I like it a bit, but oh the cardboard! This year sounds pretty advanced. We’ll see what kind of blueprints he makes at 7.

Should I teach him AutoCAD? Probably a bad idea, considering I tried to teach him to play Minecraft with a computer keyboard and mouse on the weekend so he could play the “real” poisonous potato; it did not go well.

More AP WP woes

As anyone who’s read my previous weeknotes, you may have noted my woes with AP WP and my new host. It’s an on again off again curse of a relationship. It was working, then it wasn’t. Smashing head to table, plugins on and off and on and off. Now all caching plugins are off and other under the hood plugins are in use… it seems to be… better. We’ll see what lasts.

Still Edu-ma-cating

Still working towards that AIPMM CPM designation. Slowly but surely watching those percents go up and up every day.

What Else?

Let’s see….

• Ikea furniture madness
  • I shouldn’t be hacking away at walls with saws, but I did, and it kinda looks good
• Tinkering a bit, brushing off cobwebs on Symfony & Rails.
  • I know, I know… different languages, but hey, why not.
• Actually giving AI a bit of a chance. Though very timid on it all still.
• Lot’s of talking and searching, and exploring on the j-o-b front.
  • All in all in that questioning everything place.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. Typing for typing-sake on this one.

L8rs

“That rug really tied the room together… man”

So after being on the web for a very long time, I’m working to get me all certified. Product Manager certified.

So – let the schooling being. I’m going through ProductSide

Why Product Manager?

As the quote says, it does tie the room together. I’ve got a little of this, and a little of that in my tool belt. PMs need to straddle multiple perspectives and skills. A bit of design, a bit of tech, a bit of marketing and a bit of biz, all with the objective of making products better.

Every company I’ve worked for at some point let’s me be me, and I mash, assimilate info, and create: MVPs, POCs, experiments, pilot programs, and more.

Unfortunately, for me, I’ve never been with a company with an official Product team. Hopefully an AIPMM CPM certification can open that door. 🤷

The great digital move of 2025

It was a bit of a learning curve, but for the most part it’s done. I’m now hosting on Canadian soil.

I started with my previous host in 2006! Before I say 15+, but it was more like almost 20! Boy oh boy the mess in the wake of that many years.

It was a reminder to always clean my toys when I’m done playing with them and what happens if you don’t. It was also a very good exercise to purge, and prep to purge.

Too many domains I’m squatting on that I thought, at the time where cool, but now look back, I set them to “Don’t Auto Renew”.

One last task to take me about a year, is to transfer domains when I need. Paying to transfer all at once is a bit out of budget.

WP Activitypub plugin and Nginx issue

In the process, and for lessons. I did have one problem with porting ActivityPub over. Seems my new host adds an Nginx cache to sites to give ’em a bit of a boost. However… turns out it broke this site and ground it all to a halt.

Seems unless configured specifically using Nginx cache doesn’t like to swap content types. So when a page is rendered as HTML one moment, and then asked to render again as JSON-LD for activity pub, things go a bit off the rail.

Sadly that means I had to turn this feature off with my host, as they currently don’t allow for individual customization at the moment. But happily that I could, and this site in all it’s ActivityPub glory, can continue.

Back to AP and Statamic

A while back I mentioned about getting AP working for Statamic, and now that my hosting move is complete, back to this pet project. Keep you posted in my next weeknotes.

This week’s notes are more like a to-do:

• 🗹 One last get-a-way
• 🗹 Full family vomit-fest
• 🗹 Back to school shopping
• 🗹 Kiddo’s first day of grade 2
• 🚧 Move hosting to Canada
  • 🗹 Triennially? 3 years.? Oddly this is super common in Canadian hosting. At first think, ouch… then…
  • 🗹 Do the math of the 15+ years with currency conversion
  • 🗹 Get a hold of all the old friends still squatting in the dark corner of existing host
  • 🚧 Copy everything off the old host
  • 🚧 SQL dump all the long forgotten db’s
  • 🗹 Run a whois on every domain… do I even still own that???
  • 🗹 Learn about the new host by bugging their support with two tickets a day
  • 🚧 Check every email alias and painstakingly move each one
  • 🚧 Swap Nameservers
  • 🚧Wait for propagation
  • 🚧 Confirm SSL

I started with the simple sites. And I’m just about to start with the more complex, like this one.

I might go dark.

I have no idea what moving a WordPress site does to the ActivityPub plugin. We’ll see. 🤞

See you on the other side.

This weeks notes is brought to you by these three emoji’s.

🩹 – The band-aid was ripped

Well, temporary no longer! Almost 3 months later, the company I worked for has decided the layoff was no longer temporary. Docs signed and all. The weight of will they, won’t they, has been lifted. And the answer is… thanks for all the fish.

🚪& 🪟 – Doors and windows and such

A classic phrase, when one door closes a window opens. Or is it, don’t let the door hit you in the butt so hard you fly out a window? Something like that.

For the past 3 months I’ve been killing skeletons to craft me some bone meal to quickly grow new opportunities! And probably playing a little too much Minecraft with my son.

There might be somethings in the works…

I’m never stationary…

Like a shark…

More like Dory…

Who am I kidding, Flash Slothmore.