Monday
Managed my first full day of coding since the new baby was born. Never underestimate how disruptive a newborn baby can be! I was working on building out the online booking system for Holiday Cottages in Whitby. They already have a back-office system I built a few years ago, so much like I did for Ladycross at the start of the year, this is additional functionality built into a pre-existing system.
Felt good to be making progress and writing code again.
Tuesday
Continued to develop the online booking tool. But, due to the baby being awake almost all night, I drove some of my family to Scarborough for a dental appointment, to avoid Megan having to drive tired.
Managed a bit more development time in the afternoon. The rain’s stopped and the sun’s shining, so that feels better too.
Wednesday
Continued the development of the holiday accommodation booking system I’ve been working on. This included implementing the Brevo API to send all email communication within a branded template. Also implemented Stripe hosted checkout, with a webhook configured to process completed payments.
Continued to build out the Whitby Lit Fest website and prepared an email campaign to go out next week announcing the first pair of authors. Looking forward to seeing the programme come together.
Thursday
Attended Middlesbrough Front End. It was a great day out.
Also, imported all my ancient blog posts into this website. This included everything published on jackbarber.co.uk since 2011. At some point I lost a load of images. I guess I didn’t feel they were worth retaining from a previous version of the website. I plan on slowly working through the older articles, replacing the lost images where I can, fixing broken links and generally breathing new life into older content. Looking forward to seeing what happens to my SEO!
Friday
Received some feedback from the holiday cottages client, re-worked the pricing calculation for their online booking system.
Bit of graphic design for Whitby Lit Fest (leaflets, banners) followed by a meeting to discuss the launch email, press releases, website and a few other bits and bobs.
An afternoon spent cracking on with more client work.