I’m back working on a project (TPP) I was told to take a break on a few months ago. It’s a web app built with Laravel, AlpineJS, Livewire, and Tailwindcss. It is actually the first real web app I ever built.

Prior to TPP, I had only just begun learning PHP and trying to build a web app (Open Outreach) in vanilla PHP. I did not even know frameworks were a thing. I just had a php file for every page and would manually query the database with SQL. To say the least, Open Outreach did not get very far.

I made some mistakes on TPP but I’m a much better developer now and it’s fun ripping out old components and rebuilding things. I have already improved things drastically in just a few hours.

Currently working on redesigning the whole UI. I will keep posting update periodically.

I spent the longest time trying to get Laravel Nova to work. Finally figured out my dumb mistake. I had setup a policy for the model I was trying to create a resource for and I had set the viewAny function to return false. Now I have it set to check for the viewNova gate. All fixed now 👍

Today I purchased an unlimited license to Laravel Nova because it’s currently $100 off. I have never used it until today and it’s convenient for creating quick admin dashboards.

I finally got my new clutch installed in my BMW f650gs. I’m enjoying riding it!

I need to decide on a pricing model for Sublime Blogs. I think most features are going to be free and only image hosting will cost. Do I charge per user or per site?

Sublime Blogs is up and running! I still have a lot more to do but the basics are there and I’m able to start testing things. Now I need to be able to have the option to import from Wordpress.

I fixed the bug I found on the post edit page on Sublime Blogs. It was kinda a dumb mistake. Now everything is working!

Last night I deployed Sublime Blogs to production to test everything out as it stands. The markdown editor completely broke so I got it working locally. Still no luck on production. I’m not getting any error codes or logs either. I will take a look at it tomorrow and see if I can figure out the issue.

Oh I forgot about subscription billing. I will need to build that out for Sublime Blogs.

I have almost all the main components for Sublime Blogs done. I’m working on authorization right now and then I need to pull together some basic documentation and build out the marketing website. I hope to launch a public beta by the end of April.

Today I worked on getting image uploads to work on Sublime Blogs. It took me a while to figure it out but now it is working!

Today I had I job that required I go spelunking… well sort of. I had to crawl underneath the sacturay of a church that was built in 1905! It was very tight and the enterance was a long way away from where we needed to go.

Today on Sublime Blogs I wrapped up the functionality to switch the site you are working on and started building out the API. Here you can see the edit page for a site where you can create API access tokens.

Over the past several months, I have been trying to decide whether or not to cancel my Google Workspaces subscription. I use it for my business email and I’m grandfathered in to an unlimited storage plan for only $12/month.

I used to use it as my main form of storage for all the client work I did but I have since decided I don’t want all my data in the hands of Google, especially not the only copy I have, so I purchased a Synology NAS. Now comes the part where I have to migrate 2TB of data from Google Drive to my NAS. Fun 😞

I won’t really by using much storage on Google Drive but I don’t like the thought of giving up my grandfathered in plan.

I don’t share as much data with clients anymore (now I’m doing mostly web developer and that is all on GitHub) so I could just throw any files I need to share on an S3 bucket. Maybe even throw that behind CloudFlare for caching.

Sublime Blogs is coming along well. EasyMDE has been working amazing so far!

I set up CloudFlare to cache a site and in the process broke my internet controlled garage door opener. I don’t recall ever blogging about my custom garage door opener, but I should soon. Basically, I can open and close the garage door with a Siri Shortcut or control it from through a webpage.

I had to restart a server and grey cloud the subdomain I have it setup on. It’s fixed now!

I want to build a house out of an old school bus (commonly referred to as a skoolie). I have been doing some research and I found the idea of converting a diesel school bus to run on waste vegetable oil from restaurants (which you can do with a Diesel engine). One more thing to add to my skoolie wishlist.

I think I will use Digital Ocean spaces for image hosting on Sublime Blogs. I wonder how much bandwidth and storage each site will use 🤔. That is going to be hard to estimate.

I have been making progress on Sublime Blogs. It has been going rather smoothly. It’s always that way whenever I start a new project. Sort of deceitful… it gets much harder down the road. Currently, I’m just setting up everything, defining the database schema, and creating the basic dashboard.

It took me a while to finally decided on a javascript text editor to use on the front-end. I have three major requirements. It has to support markdown, allow image uploading, and be open source, so I can tweak and customize as needed without having to worry about licensing.

Easy Markdown Editor, or EasyMDE for short, fulfilled all three of those requirements and as a bonus, has a great UI. It’s a fork of SimpleMDE with a few added features. After a few hours of work, I was able to get the editor to send its content, on update, back to whatever Livewire component it is embedded in. It may not be the most elegant… but it works.

Here we are again… days since my last blog post. I really need to get better at blogging more often. I think I’m going to challenge myself to blog at least once a day. It may be something interesting… it may not. But I will at least post about something every day.

I guess that is how 7-Eleven restocks 🤔 …through the front door? Looks awkward for customers.

“How can I help you, sir? Oh! Yeah… just ignore the giant semi truck out in front. “

Inspired by Sublime Ads (a SaaS Vincent Ritter is developing), Sublime Blogs is a new project I’m working on. It is a Headless CMS designed specifically to add a blog to any frontend static site generator.

After doing a lot of research, I’m yet to find a cheap and simple solution to move my blog over to Netlify. I’m very particular about my tech stack, and I want to be able to use the tooling I’m familiar with (Jigsaw and Tailwindcss) while still being able to post blog posts easily from my phone.

I decided to solve my problem by building Sublime Blogs. More information coming soon…

I’m working on a new SaaS (software as a service) inspired by Vincent Ritter’s Sublime Ads. I will blog about it as I work out the details.

It seems like I go through phases of posting frequently, and then it feels like nothing interesting happens for a while and I neglect to write anything.

I have been working on a few projects that some may find interesting. I have outlined them below.

Vue JS

I have been working on learning Vue JS. For those of you that are not familiar with Vue, it’s very similar to React (a piece of technology built and used by Facebook (now Meta)¹).

I’m enjoying using it so far. I have the tendency to jump in head first instead of working through tutorials, so progress on the app I’m working on is a bit slow. I will post more about it soon.

BMW f650gs

I have been working on replacing the clutch in my 2001 BMW f650gs. It’s a bit tricky and the stack height on the new one I think is a little too tall. Hopefully it works.

I know there are more projects, but honestly, I started writing out this post several days ago, and now I forgot what I was going to say. Oops 😬

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1. Is it proper to nest parentheses inside one another or is that just something I picked up web development? 🤔 ↩︎