Weeknotes 19:21

December 16, 2019

Week of December 8-14

We (LGND team) launched a redesigned site for the Center for American Entrepreneurship last week. I built the site with WordPress and Advanced Custom Fields.

I created custom post types (Custom Post Type UI plugin) for news items, press releases, research reports, and people connected to the Center including staff, board members and advisors. I also had fun building various custom queries to display the custom post types in different ways so the site content is mostly dynamic.  The client was very pleased with their new site.

New site design for Center for American Entrepreneurship that I built over the past two months. startupsusa.org

I found a helpful article that helped me import content from their former WordPress site that was all posts and split them into separate custom post types for news and press releases and then uses the default post type for blog posts. On the former site, this content was differentiated by category. But I wanted to use the categories for the blog posts. I did three different exports based on the category and then did a find and replace to route the different exports to the correct custom post type.

Other notes from the week:

  • I continued working on a redesign project that I started a month ago. I used the same procedure to split out imported content into three different post types. I am really excited about how this project is coming along. I am having a lot of fun using CSS Grid to solve a variety of different problems.
  • Smashing Magazine made its latest webinar available for free. Rachel Andrew live-coded a layout from a screenshot of the BBC website. I enjoyed watching her talk through her process. It was very much the same sort of process that I used when approaching a layout using the same tools (CSS Grid and Flexbox).
  • I am enjoying the book Range. Very interesting insights on learning. I plan to re-read it later when my team reads it next spring for a book club.
  • I started reading through a sample of the book Atomic Habits. I mentioned last week that I had started reading Free to Focus. Both of these books were recommended by Rachel Andrew in a recent Smashing Newsletter. I am currently borrowing Free to Focus from the library. I wanted to test drive some books first before committing to reading and applying them. I am really interested in upping my productivity game in 2020. After sampling, Free to Focus and Atomic Habits, I am planning to buy both of them with gift cards that I anticipate receiving later this month.
  • I have been reading through the book of Isaiah this month (reading plan from Tony Reinke) for advent. #IsaiahChristmas
  • I have been enjoying watching The Repair Shop on Netflix with my wife. I have enjoyed seeing these different craftspeople repair family heirlooms. It is great to see their skills, their love of their craft, and the care they serve their customers. I also enjoy watching their interactions with each other and bringing their different skills together. It is the kind of team situation that I have always wanted to be a part of. I think I have found that with LGND though the interactions are a bit different being that they are through Slack and other tools that facilitate distributed teams. I have enjoyed doing some shorter Zoom meetings with different teammates to collaborate. I might try to take advantage of that a bit more in the new year.
  • I finished watching Season 1 of Agent Carter on Netflix.
  • I watched Captain America: Civil War on Disney+ over the weekend before starting the week.
  • I found a Christmas album on Spotify that I really like. I have searched each year for it and they finally have it.
  • We had our first snowfall of the winter. I really like driving in the snowfall at night and seeing it in the headlights. The snow melted as soon as it hit the pavement which is my favorite kind of snow to drive in. I spent 13 years living in Florida and we get very little snow in Chattanooga. But when it does, it brings back memories from growing up in Missouri and my early adulthood in Kansas.
  • It was a short work week. I took off early on Thursday to drive up to Nashville to pick up my daughter from college. We drove back Friday morning and I enjoyed relaxing the rest of the day on Friday. I am looking forward to some more time off the week of Christmas. I had enough PTO to take off the entire week.
  • I listened to the Syntax FM podcast on my drive up to Nashville. The episode was their 2019 Gift Guide. I like how they went beyond tech to talk about experiences and health and wellness ideas.

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