Journal

Updates about what I'm working on, books I'm reading, stuff I'm thinking about, news on the farm, product releases and more.

The long overdue update - what I've been working on

Every site redesign / rebuild starts off with the best intentions. In my case, having a shiny new home for my portfolio and blog would of course mean I'd miraculously start blogging daily, but alas that hasn't been the case. Real life happened and as a result, updating my site fell by the way-side. That doesn't mean I haven't been busy though. In all the madness of the past 2+ years, my priorities have shifted from working online to preparing offline. Things like taking the farm from a hobby t

New Jamstack site for my dad

I recently had a few days over in the week after completing a new client project, so without anything else directly competing for my time, I figured it would be a good opportunity to work on a new site for my dad, who is a natural health practitioner and coach. The previous site was thrown together in a day on WordPress.com and a few years down the line and around 200 posts, the site quickly became hard to navigate and even harder to surface content. The site was built using Gridsome, with G

Hey ho, it's SmokeyFro!

It's been a long time coming, but I finally got around to creating a personal site that I'm proud of. This a complete rebuild of my tired (and somewhat half-arsed) version, which lived over at devignerforhire.com for a couple years. The motivation behind the rebuild was multi-fold... Firstly, I was never really happy with the old site. It was somewhat rushed and never finished and has been a thorn in my side for way too long. The story of the cobblers shoes comes to mind. Second, I have a bun

Beans review from local dev

I recently came across a comment by local WordPress dev, Simon Dowles, on a review of Beans. I enjoyed reading about his first impressions, so I reached out and asked if he'd mind me publishing it on the blog. He was kind enough to agree, so without further adieu, here it is. I stumbled across Beans about 2 months ago when I saw the author of Beans at a local WordCamp Conference. I decided to poke around the docs a bit to get an idea of what the framework was capable of. While it was a lot of