Month: October 2015

On rethinking my database structure

I’ve been using Laravel for my personal website for about eight months now and haven’t looked back since.

This huge advantage to my rebuilding it in that way — from its original WordPress foundations — was that I had a crash course in using Laravel as well as learning some best practices as well.

Now that I have been using my site daily for all this time, I have found places where it has got messy — unavoidable through the learning experience — as well as places where I want to refine how I publish.

At the moment I am using what are called explicit post types. Meaning that I manually choose which post type a particular post belongs to before publishing — picking the appropriate create form to publish from.

However I have been thinking more and more about implicit post types — post types whose contents define what sort of post it is. Going the way of implicit may also see me abolishing the need for post-type-specific areas of my site.

I could still do this to some degree I suppose. e.g. If a post doesn’t have a title, it’s a note; If it has a location, it’s a checkin; etc.

The only way to see how this is going to go is to build it and actually publish with it for a while, I guess.

Update 8th February 2021: I now use WordPress for my website and have done for a few years now.

Rewriting my database structure is proving more work than first thought. Still – I’ve learnt some new Laravel stuff which is always good. So even if it never ends up being used, it’s not been a wasted exercise.

Setting up samba share on my home network

Secure shell into file server.

Install samba if not already present:

sudo apt-get install samba

Create samba password with :

sudo smbpasswd -a YOUR_USERNAME

Configuring the share:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf
# /etc/samba/smb.conf

[media] 
path = /home/YOUR_USERNAME/Share 
available = yes 
valid users = YOUR_USERNAME 
read only = no 
browsable = yes 
public = yes 
writable = yes

Restart samba:

sudo restart smbd

Starting to implement some css flexbox into my site. At first I was going to completely restart my site’s styling, but instead I opted to checkpoint it tonight at ‘v1’. Then any new changes become ‘v2’, which will change over time.