Week 31 of 2020 brings some long-form writing, Make Life Work S04, Youtubing, education data storage, blood blisters and camping in St Ives.
Following my break, this week was mostly about preparing Season 4 of Make Life Work.
I asked Twitter whether it should continue on this website or a dedicated site: a resounding response (of 18 votes) prompted me to sort something out on makelife.work
Following that, I started looking at options – whether to continue with a WordPress site or try something different like a static site on Netlify. Early POC’s suggest the latter would work but could create a lot more effort. Pinecast offers websites out the box too but not much customisation (especially with short URL’s etc). WordPress is familiar but comes at extra cost/setup efforts. Decisions, decisions…
Before all this though, I started reaching out to potential guests. I was so delighted most invites were accepted. Rachael Depp, Franca Hood, Dan Viddicombe and Elizabeth Elcoate all responded promptly and keenly. We’ve got August to organise recordings and I have one more guest up my sleeve who I’m sure will be game but I also like the idea of keeping one “secret” until later.
To compliment the season announcement, I wanted to get some archives on a new YouTube channel. Using a combination of Shapefactory, Canva and Headliner (get 2 weeks free Pro with that link), this was quite straight forward. There’s so much extra potential getting content on the world’s biggest provider but, for MVP, it was a case of suitable images/videos to compliment the audio with useful links in descriptions. I also setup some short URL’s on the new domain using the sXXyYY format.
Friday morning, (scheduled) social media posts went out to promote the new season and Youtube content. It’s quite satisfying to see it all come together on time and receive some lovely feedback from my peers. (Thanks to my On The Side comrades for their support through the week too.)
Additional to all this, Mrs J has been asking for some help to setup a website for her project at work. I can’t share too much but it’s a simple website with a booking system to generate leads in education so requires some data capture. My default option is WordPress with a plugin but it needs to be GDPR-compliant at least, with plenty security layers on some sensitive data. Trying to keep it simple (stupid) but it could open a can of worms.
On the health front, I got back into some running mid-week hitting over 8km but then disaster hit: nasty blood blisters on the end of my toes were showing the next day. I’ve struggled with these before and sounds like it could be due to tight shoes – many people recommend getting at least one size larger for running. Needless to say, I need to take time off to sort them out.
Life side of things, I’ve got another break coming up next week. I’ll try to blog some week notes but we’ll be camping in St Ives so internet is likely to be dreadful. I’ll be taking my laptop as I might get some time for side projects but setting zero expectations. I’ve neglected the bass guitar I got for my birthday and still have plenty to read so we’ll see. Two weeks off work will be delightful though. Last week’s “warm up” in Greece already feels like a distant memory…