Website and affiliates

I finally got around to completing version 1.0 of my wife's website for her art and business.

I'm not a web developer or content manager, but we went over the requirements, the main ones were a portfolio gallery and an asset rotator on the front page.

It took a while to get to grips with working on this kind of thing again, going through several iterations based on different platforms before finally landing on WordPress.

If you want, you can check them out. I've added the hyperlinks.

Once this was complete and the "customer" was happy, I decided it was time I updated my own website.

For the longest time, it was just a static page with a blurb and contact information. Honestly, it was looking pretty amateur.

The intention as with most websites is to attempt to engage with customers. I always had the idea of driving traffic from places like Twitch, YouTube, Twitter etc to a main site that had all the information in one place and showcase some of my other hobbies and services. I don't really have a particular niche, but I think I come up with or at least stumble upon some interesting stuff on occasion.

I've gone with a generic “tech services” template for now and having removed a lot of the boiler-plate stuff, I think it looks ok. There's basically no information on it presently, besides the contact information, but at least it now links out to this blog. In time, my intention will be to customise the theme for more of a tech geek style, with my central green colour scheme running through it.

Back along, my Sister created a family WhatsApp group for easily communicating updates during a difficult time. She had posted a link to a shower head on Amazon and it ended up being quite popular within the family. I believe at last count, five of us have one. I joked that she should create an affiliate link for it so that she could get a small kick back.

I thought it might be fun to make a pseudo-shop, which showcases things that I've found or purchased that I think are cool or useful enough to show. I created an Amazon affiliate account that I could link out to, so if anyone ever thinks like me and wants to purchase an item, I'll be able to see. This would primarily be for the purpose of learning a bit about something new, I really don't expect to make any money from it.

From there, I also created an affiliate account with my chosen hosting provider Eco Hosting, after chatting with a colleague in the market for a domain. So, I've been toying with CNAMES and subdomains to try and make this a little more useable and professional looking.

Lastly on the website front, I had an idea in my head for some time now for a website that has a bunch of how-to guides about things I've learned while streaming on Twitch.

Things like how to do certain things in Open Broadcast Studio, setup cameras and microphones, add transitions and more custom elements like counters using Streamer.bot.

The ultimate goal would be to have written articles outlining the steps, with an accompanying YouTube video.

The sites working title is "Streaming is Hard"

If you're reading this and have any interest, do please leave a comment to say so and if there is anything particularity you wish to see on there.

There's not really a timeline for this as such. back along I went through my current OBS configuration and noted everything down, with the intention of one day ripping it all out and doing a stream where I set it all up from scratch.

This way, I can easily split it up in to clips to add to the articles. What would be really cool and time-saving would be if I could get some sort of step recorder that I could use to create the framework of the written article. I'll have to do some research, If I remember correctly the built-in windows step record is not quite as clever as all that.

That's about it for this one. I know I say this every couple of years, but I am, once again, going to try and update this blog more frequently and I have a number of new posts in the pipe.

I'm going to try and find a balance between frequency and energy expenditure, so that I don't burn out too quickly.

Keep an eye out for the next one which will be in a few days to a week. I'm not sure which one I will choose for the next instalment, most of them being of a technical nature, outlining what I've setup or done with a particular service or piece of software, but I think they have the bones of something interesting.

Take care of yourself and keep an eye on your spoons.

Half an Oven, Windy Fence Panels and plenty of Mince Pies.

I got home from picking my wife up from work and the oven broke.

It tripped the breaker and then the main oven wouldn't heat up above 50 degrees.

We had a look online and found a suitable replacement.

The whether was pretty bad overnight, to the point where Max was a little uneasy,

but he eventually settled down.

In the morning, I came downstairs to make coffee and let Max out into the garden to find that

a fence post had broken at the base, meaning two panels had collapsed, due to the high winds.

This meant a trip to B&Q to get wood and tools I hadn't already got for the job .

It seems as though where the bushes had become over-grown, the root system had cracked some of the

concrete around the post, which in turn got wet, rotted away and eventually broke.

I tried getting as much of the wood out as possible, which turned out to be about 20 CM, so I gave that up.

The concrete is still solid and almost half a metre square, so I decided I wasn't getting that out anytime soon and even if I managed it, what the hell am I gonna do with a large lump of concrete?

My wife did her normal and searched online for local businesses that did fencing work.

I look down the list of companies and of course, nearly all of them use Gmail or outlook.com or Yahoo of all things.

I browse the websites to look and they're all the same bog standard designs with bad fonts and layouts and even spelling errors, which annoys the hell out of me.

Yes, you may not be able to set up a website yourself and maybe you cant afford to get someone in to do that for you, but the least you can do is proof your own damn copy.

I've been off work for two weeks now. 

Feeling a lot less stressed now that stuff has cleared out of my head and not having to remember certain manual tasks on a daily and weekly basis also makes for a lot clearer head space.

I sometimes catch myself wondering what's happening with those tasks. Before I eventually turned my work phone off, I still saw people emailing me directly with queries and such, so its reasonable to assume some of them are being missed.

I still have no idea what's going to happen when I do go back in January. 

I've been meaning to start writing an email to my boss including a list of things that I think need attention and that I feel would help me to be moved to someone else's remit. 

I've' generally been putting this off to avoid the resultant anxiety, but this has proven to create its own problem in that whenever I put my head down to sleep, my brain immediately tries to run through them all at the same time, so I should really start getting that list down for my own benefit.

Still, now is the time for rest and relaxation over this holiday period. Mince pies are a-go-go and some of the various cheeses in the fridge have been open, not to mention the large box of milk tray I received in the post has completely gone.