Ross's Micro Blog

Hah. I just discovered the Google Feud guess-the-autocomplete game. Am I the only person that didn’t know about this?

http://www.googlefeud.com/index-gb.html

Now I can write what I REALLY wanted to write! 😃

Quick tech note before I go into the weekend and forget. Quite an advanced/specific one:

WordPress: Fixing shortcodes that enqueue JavaScript when used in ACF fields.

https://rosswintle.uk/2019/09/wordpress-fixing-shortcodes-that-enqueue-javascript-when-used-in-acf-fields/

I need to categorically say that I think my son’s school is ACE. I’m 180% happy with it. The staff are amazing. Any attempt to get involved in school comms is me genuinely and freely wanting to use my skills to improve things for all schools and parents.

With that in mind…

Hmm… What should you say if you’re ACTUALLY asking for a friend? 😂

Is there a meme generator for the Bart-Simpson-Writing-Lines-On-A-Blackboard image?

Asking for a friend.

Heh. I wrote a simple button-driven vanilla-JavaScript chatbot framework in 50 lines of code.

#winning

😂

Pretty sure NatWest could save a significant %age of my £5 monthly business account fee by not sending me details of my £5 monthly account fee in the post. 😂

Worse than “the tech you use sucks” is the more personal “who the hell works with this tech?”

Because, for a large number of other people, the answer is “Well, actually, I do!”

And you just shunned them from your community by making them feel stupid.

Observation (of a minority of people):

JavaScript: PHP sucks
PHP: WordPress sucks
WordPress dev’s: Page builders suck
Page builder users: All the other page builders suck

Can we just accept that there are different tools for different jobs and then be nice to each other?

I quite like the Wikipedia snippet that @DuckDuckGo gives you when you search for “lorem ipsum”. It works far better as placeholder text than actual Lorem ipsum! Will make far more sense to clients. 👍

I will add that yes, I know about Laravel Shift. But I wanted to do this manually to get a feel for the process.

– Knowledge from Marcel Pociot Package Development course was super helpful! https://phppackagedevelopment.com/
– One of the apps had tests – I felt so much more confident upgrading that!
– Upgrading can be hard – you need to know PHP and Composer well to understand messages and debug

Yesterday I did one side-project app upgrade from Laravel 5.1 to 6.0 and one from 5.7 to 5.8 and then 6.0.

Really simple apps, I should add.

Notes:
– New ignition errors weren’t always helpful and took some getting used to.
– Had to fork the ReCaptcha package I use

Coffee to the left of me
Lemsip to the right
Here I am stuck in the middle with flu*!

(Not actually flu)

I’m sitting in bed with half a voice and feeling rubbish. But I want to do some thanking and promoting while I’m here.

Firstly, Laravel 6 was out this week. So huge thanks to Taylor, Mohammed and everyone that makes this awesome free thing that I get to use. 🙌

Finally, on headphones. When I got my not-true-wireless earbuds about two years ago for £30 I was like “Woah, you can get tech like that that isn’t terrible for £30‽‽”

I’m now doing the same with true-wireless. It’s VERY impressive.

I’ve yet to cycle with them but they seem comfy, light and stay in my ears (which I didn’t expect). They’re a bit big and stupid-looking but 🤷‍♂️. Sound quality is fine for podcasts and a bit of music, audiophiles will protest. Not tried a call yet. Mic probably awful.

Having lost my wireless earbuds while cycling, I thought I’d try “true wireless”. Apple’s things never stay in my ears and I was on a budget. I picked up these for £30 and they do the job just fine.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07SZ8V339/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_U_x_7ItCDbDB13VMN

Someone shared this sweet, joyful, innocent, beautiful, fun little father-and-daughter video years ago. It makes frequent appearances in our house. Maybe it’ll make a nice break from politics and tech: https://youtu.be/Bpu0TIXzI1w