Week 36 of 2020 brings the start of Season 4, WordPress woes, a family side project, guinea pigs, wrestling, learning disabilities and £20 movie passes.
WordPress Headaches
As I tried to configure a brand new website for the Make Life Work Podcast, I struggled to get the domain working correctly through Cloudflare on an existing shared hosting plan. In the end, I brought a dedicated EasyWP plan along with a basic PositiveSSL certificate all through Namecheap and fixed the Cloudflare DNS Only settings (following a ticket to support). I’ve never had so many issues with domains – maybe I’m losing it…?
Anyway, it’s finally coming together now with most the core content available. The website still needs a bit of love on the performance and optimisation plus some extra configurations before the podcast feed and newsletter are migrated but we’re getting close to an MLP.
The First Recording
It wasn’t just about the website this week – the first episode was recorded with brand designer, Liz Elcoate. After the Summer break, I’ve actually got some new kit – brand new Mac for my birthday, Samson Q2U mic and tripod stand for iPhone with Camo – so I was a little nervous of how it might all come out. Even with local test recordings, I wasn’t entirely convinced it would work remotely so, thanks to a brief message On The Side, Juan jumped on a Zoom call where audio and video both came through beautifully. Then I could relax and enjoy the conversation with Liz which will be released in the next week or so.
Acceler8ed
This weekend, I also spent an afternoon brainstorming and rapid prototyping a website for my wife’s new project at work, Acceler8 Education.
Again, WordPress to the rescue and, this time, without all the nightmares of Make Life Work. It allowed us to focus on the content, functionality and basic formatting with a focus on MVP.
With kids returning to school from lockdown, quite far behind with their personal development, it’s optimal time to promote private tutoring. Potential leads are already flying in from friends on the socials so, naturally, all the popular handles were registered on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to support the promotion, opting with @acceler8edu for consistency and succinctness.
New Guinea
At home, Princess decided to spend her birthday money on not one but two new guinea pigs (apparently recommended for companionship). Both kids really enjoyed cuddling up to them – I’d often enter the living room to find squeaking creatures cooing over the furry little things. We even had a little fun with them watching other talking guineas on Youtube #GuineaPigInception
What To Watch
Amongst all the side projects, we’ve amazingly found time to enjoy some new TV content:
- Peanut Butter Falcon on Netflix – a wonderful story of a Downs kid chasing his dream, brilliantly performed by Shia, Zack and Dakota.
- There She Goes on iPlayer – another story about a disabled character, this time a dark comedy with David Tennant and Jessica Hynes braving a very difficult topic on raising a child with learning disabilities.
- Mulan on DisneyPlus (Premium) – why suffer the (current) terrible cinema experience when you could watch the latest Disney live action from the comfort of your own home and at half the price? In all seriousness, it was probably one of the best live action remakes of the series, despite some questionable SFX thrown in. The family definitely enjoyed it anyway – worth the £20 single movie pass after all.