Streamlining & Father's Day
Because of Juneteenth, Father’s Day weekend was a three-day affair. Each day was productive in it’s own way: Friday I worked on some freelance work, Saturday spent most of the day with my mom doing some stuff for her around the house and Sunday, Father’s Day, the whole family went to see a minor league baseball game. It was perfect weather for baseball, and is there anything better than an afternoon with the family (even my oldest who claimed he spent more time in the sun on Sunday than in the past five years) having hot dogs, beers, and watching baseball?
The freelance work I did Friday mostly involved wrapping up a Wordpress to Statamic conversion for marylandliteraryreview.com. When I originally built MLR some 8 years ago, I needed a few plugins to get the site to behave as I wanted. Most of the main issue was getting the archives to behave the same way for every issue. And knowing what I know now, I’m sure I could’ve built it differently. But I built it in a rather convoluted way that required me to follow a 24-step checklist, with some of those items being nested 4 levels deep. Obviously not an optimal build, nor a very efficient use of time.
The new version involves me creating a new issue, and then associating the various works with that issue. And that’s about all to it. All the archiving happens automagically, the various genres now all have their own dedicated pages, the seo is LOADS better, and did I mention how easy it is to update now? The most recent issue is the first one in Statamic itself and I can confidently say I will no longer dread when it’s time to put out the issue.
I’ll still dread poets and their insistence on weird spacings, and indents. But that’s another story.