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.

Confessional Update

Forgive me world wide web, for I have sinned, It's been 8 months since my last blog post.
As expected, I'm also terrible at this too.

So whats been happening since I last posted? Well, there was a period of unemployment.
I spent my time split between job search, being anxious about the situation and trying new things.

I finally picked up a contract position in December as a systems engineer for a public sector service.
Typical 3rd line/projects kind of thing, solution designs, meetings, cost spreadsheets and gantt charts.
Things were extremely slow going to start with. There was no training to speak of, save a wiki knowledge base and asking colleagues in the immediate vicinity. So, my understanding of the ecosystem above the fundamental was patchy at best. It quickly became apparent that things were broken. Policies, procedures, people.
It was quite a mess. The place was awash with apathy, most of the responses to "why is this like this?" would mostly be "yeah, its broken, but its not going to change, so why bother worrying"
So much time was spent going round in this particular circle.
Despite all the talk from project managers and management about reviews and change coming, it was apparent that this was a holding pattern that had been in place for a awhile.
I nearly spat my coffee all over my desk when I heard a project manager tell me "Agile is coming".

Trying to talk to anyone in the management team about the problems I had seen was a tedious and painful affair. It quickly became apparent that they really didn't care about changing anything, even though their workload was high and any seemingly broken or problematic process was met with manual hand-cranking, rather than taking a little more time to try and solve the issue. There was a lot of time spent doing the same thing over and over again, things that could have easily been automated. Any question of feasibility of process or suggestion of alternatives with benefits where met with close-mindedness and the overall attitude that there simply was no problem.

My contract was terminated at the end of march, with a "thank you for all your help, goodbye" conversation. Honestly, I knew it was coming and I was glad of it.
I couldn't have worked in that environment for much longer and I have no idea how people can spend years there.
There were some positives out of the whole experience, however. I met some interesting people and I learnt YAML.

So, here I am. Back to the job search. Back to the anxiety.
Having been doing this now for a few weeks, I find myself in the same position as last year.
Working through recruitment consultants is difficult. continually chasing for roles I've applied for, endless calls and emails from consultants for jobs that I am not experienced to do, despite being told they'd read my CV.

More and more, when talking to directors of companies at interview stage, I find that I am having to explain that I am not a Linux administrator.
I have a short sentence within my personal statement that says that I like to play around with Linux in my spare time and use it at home. I'm paraphrasing here, obviously.
I've since heavily edited this sentence.
The bulk of my CV details roles within companies that are Microsoft houses, if not Microsoft partners. I have Microsoft accreditations, albeit that they're ageing now.

Another thing I find is that it seems people cant effectively manage resource any longer, especially in the contract space.
It goes like this:
company needs more staff -> company posts a new contract -> consultant passes applicants to the client -> silence.
Would it not be better to spend a little more time on hiring, in the knowledge that they will do some of that work, theoretically leaving you with more time?
I don't really understand it, not that I've been contracting for very long, but it seems the same can be said for full-time positions too.

So, while I'm waiting, I'm trying to do constructive things.
As mentioned before, my MS accreditations are now ageing and It seems like a good idea to update them, so I'm revising to take the 740-740/1/2 exams
to update my MCSA in windows server.
My current plan is to complete these and get the accreditaion, then start looking at getting a Cisco accreditation to bulster my networking knowledge.

I briefly spent some time researching the feasibility of going freelance, setting up a small consultancy and services offering, but it quickly became apparent that there is a lot of "peopling" involved, which was exhausting and the want for a mortgage anytime in the next year or so made it kind of out of the question right now.

In addition, I have the usual plethora of half finished projects that I dip in an out of.
Most recently trying to set up a reverse Apache proxy based on domain headers as my current provider doesn't offer additional IP addresses.
This has been going on for a month or so and is proving to be somewhat awkward.

Next up is the next iteration of a hardware firewall after the last one died the night I stood it up.
This time its on a raspberry pi, with an additional network interface. I've got to the stage of setting up both interfaces and installing things like DHCP, DNS etc and its now sat next to my desk, waiting for me to get back to it.

I also recently spent a not insignificant length of time trying to stand up a windows server 2016 virtual machine on the QEMU hypervisor, this too continues to evade me.

I have a lot of respect for people who manage to blog on a daily basis. Being able to pick a topic, construct an article with hopefully some interesting content, proof read and post all in a day, alongside anything and everything else they have to do on any given day.

I'd like to say that this will be the first in a line of new blog posts, with renewed vigour! but I doubt that is the case.
I seem to spend a large portion of my time watching YouTube gameplay videos, wondering what I should do next, has it been long enough that its worth checking job boards again, etc ad nauseam.
If you do stumble upon this and are interested in hearing more of anything noted here, feel free do drop a comment below and I will do an expansion post.

Until next time.....