Week 822

Week beginning Monday, 14th October 2024.

Chris L arrived back 🛬 from his 🇺🇸 Las Vegas 🎰 trip on Tuesday evening where he’d met up with some friends and attended the 🎶 Best Friends Forever Fest 🎶. The proverbial caveat ¹ notwithstanding, it sounds as if he had a really good break, although he was inevitably suffering from jet lag 😴 on Wednesday!

Mission Patch 🚀

I continued to port the app from SvelteKit to Rails 🚂 concentrating on progressively enhancing the patch designer using Hotwire Stimulus and Hotwire Turbo Streams. So far I’ve been very impressed with how relatively straightforward it’s been to implement the JavaScript enhancements and how well they’re working. And it’s been a massive help to be able to bounce ideas off Chris R as I’ve been going along. I’m really looking forward to getting the changes live and writing about the implementation in more detail.

Guy gave us some very helpful feedback on our initial implementation of the new home page design via the medium of a Supercut video with him talking us through a number of issues and demonstrating how to fix them in the browser developer tools. 🎉

Jam 🍓

Chris R spent some more time 🥇 working through the explanations on the historical transactions in FreeAgent ² checking the way we’ve handled VAT. He also did some more thinking about how we might make better use FreeAgent, DoubleAgent, Stripe Connect, etc, to simplify or even automate the work involved 🤖.

When Chris L was back, the two of them had a useful conversation about how we should handle the The Platform Operators regulations which might require us to do due diligence on jam.coop sellers and report their income to HMRC. 💸

SendBoard & Trello Butler 📩🤵

Long-time readers of this blog will know that we make heavy use of Harmonia and Trello to manage the day-to-day operation of the co-op. However, it looks as if we haven’t written much about our use of the SendBoard Trello Power-Up which is something we should rectify.

Anyway, we’ve wired up our main email address with our main Trello board and so that we can use it as a shared inbox. Over the last couple of days, Chris R has added a bunch of Trello’s Butler Rules to automatically add comments to Trello cards relating to emails that we can probably ignore - thanks, Chris! 👏

Mastodon 🐘

The Mastodon v4.3 release includes support for what Robb Knight calls “author tags”. I noticed that James A had already upgraded ruby.social 🏆 where GFR has an account, so I added the relevant meta tag to our website and configured the settings in our Mastodon account. All being well, you should now see a little “More from Go Free Range Ltd” link whenever we post a link to a page on our website/blog. 🤞

Podcast 🎙️🎧

I read Simon Willison’s article about using the new Audio Overview feature in Google’s NotebookLM to generate a podcast based on a website and so, as a bit of fun, I decided to generate one for this site. The result, although a bit cringeworthy in places, is uncannily coherent - I hope you enjoy it!

Anyway, that’s all for this week! 👋