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10 days ago, I pushed a bunch of buttons and launched this site with exactly one blog post. This is the second blog post. 10 days between will not be the norm, but I'm taking things a bit slow in the beginning. I'm taking small steps and focusing on the tasks that could potentially slow me down when I'm ready to start running full steam.
Since I'm doing all of this out in the open, here's what I've been up to over the past 10 days.
Sign up for Stripe!
In order to take subscription payments so that I can earn a living from this, I needed to create an account with Stripe. This is no secret. The Ghost.org hosting service for the Ghost platform integrates with Stripe as the primary payment partner. So off I go to Stripe.
Delay #1: The Actual Corporate Website
With my focus on the blog, I had been neglecting the primary corporate website, which is https://leetenterprises.com. My company structure will be the focus of a different post, but the short version is that the company name is Leet Enterprises LLC, which has more than one brand for publishing different content types. As such, when registering with Stripe, one of the steps was verification that the website is active.
Well...that site wasn't active. I have that set up as a simple Wordpress site with just 2 pages of static content. It's just the parent company, after all. However, the site was still in "temporary" status, and Stripe's setup service could tell that. I had two options: give this site URL as the company website to Stripe or finish the setup of the main company site. I opted for both.
One day later, I had picked an available theme for the company Wordpress site, and did very little to customize it. I did have to come up with a company logo, which I normally agonize over. It took me days to settle on the logo for A Humble Genius. For Leet Enterprises, I came up with something I quite like – a lot – in under an hour.
Once the site was live, I updated Stripe with this site URL and submitted a description of how the company name and this site URL are related. This may have all been overkill, but I like to leave paper trails (virtual or otherwise) and explain things as I go. Transparency is a big deal to me.
Website Redesign
After I published the first version of the user interface on June 30, I took a day to focus on other things, then came back and looked at it with fresh eyes both from my phone and from my laptop. In the meantime, I had other tasks to finish.
Fresh eyes can be dangerous. I liked most of what I had, but I definitely wanted to make some changes to the overall layout. I also didn't care for some of the initial design when an actual blog post was live.
Delay #2: Rabbit Holes
I went looking for inspiration on other websites and blogs. Many other websites and blogs. Sometimes, having too many options is a bad thing.
In the end, I tested, re-tested, and finally settled on the overall layout that is live as of July 10, 2024. Happily, I had already familiarized myself with the way Ghost works, with the CSS and Javascript that came with the Ghost theme that I had used as my starting point, and I was able to quickly iterate on a few of the ideas I had.
Overall, testing changes on both big screens (laptop/iPad) and small screens (phone) took the most time. Responsive web design has made this much easier and much more efficient than the last time I worked on a web interface of any significant size, but it still takes time.
Ultimately, that took about 3 days, overall, but I am quite happy with the end result. In the past 10 days, I upgraded the site from version 0.1.0, to 0.2.0, 0.3.0, 0.4.0, 0.5.0 and, finally, 0.6.0. I will let this "gel" for a couple of days, and will probably re-label this as version 1.0.0 with a minor update to the footer (it doesn't scale correctly on small devices).
Gaining Some Technical Knowledge
I realized that I still had some gaps in my knowledge about how some aspects of the Ghost platform work. I felt that it was in my best interest to fill in those gaps before taking the next steps with the site.
Newsletters
I needed a better understanding of how the newsletter mechanism works. I do not ever want to be blindsided by problems that can affect others (sending unwanted or unnecessary emails) that I could otherwise prevent with a little extra knowledge.
Subscriptions
Same with newsletters, I really felt the need to make some deeper dives into how the subscription and payment integrations worked. Up to this point, I couldn't really explore it until I had an active integration.
Node.js Ecosystems
I picked the Ghost platform for many reasons (that'll be a series of blog posts). Ironically, though, Ghost has a Javascript backend, which I have never been fond of. I have some opinion pieces to write about that, and I'll leave those details for that later date.
This did mean, however, that I had some additional reading to do on some of the tools used for developing a Ghost theme, and especially preparing one for deployment. I read up more on Yarn and Gulp, then tailored the scripts to omit the resource map files when zipping up the theme for distribution.
Select an Issue Tracking Service
I needed an issue tracker. I've done that exclusively in a spreadsheet, before, and wanted to avoid that if at all possible. There are quite a few competing services for issue trackers, and I looked at the current state of a few of them, then settled on a service from Jetbrains. Why? That'll be another blog post.
Track Some Issues!
I did, of course, see some things I want to change after each release, so I tracked them both for my sanity and to make sure the tool I selected would work for me (so far, the answer is yes).
Video Game Design Work
One of my brands, Leet Factory (site still in progress) is all about making games and cool software. I have story-driven video game in the works, but I am not ready to give many details, yet. I did, however, actually write down the story of the first game and realized it flows nicely into a sequel (which is just in my head at the moment).
And, Finally, Something Secret
I also spent a day on something secret, that will hopefully resolve in a week or two.
Summary
It's been a full 10 days. Most of the work was to clear the way so I can focus on just writing as much as possible. I also gave myself the day off for Independence Day, since I'm my own boss. This was one of the first holidays in nearly 20 years without keeping a phone nearby in case someone from work needed something from me. I cannot tell you how liberating that was. But I have a feeling I'll make that into a separate blog post, as well!