Forest Lytton

Home resting for what i hope is the end of a covid-esque virus(?) we picked up at a big music event in town last month. Been low energy every afternoon just when meetings pick up. Alexa has been showing photos from this week in our 11-year history together. It was our shopping trip to Basingstoke for wedding finery. It was a lovely memory to see us trying on gowns and suit tails!

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More training or validation, or learning in particular, would have been useful. Yes, I completed the RESTFUL API course on LinkedIn Learning, but I did not, in the end, realise that REST and RESTFUL were 2 different things. Reviewing Laracasts Intro to PHP, Chapter 32, handling multiple requests chapter and Jeffrey Way mentioned the word restful in passing so I looked it up to refresh. Turns out I was missing the point.

In the spirit of clean code and improving code regularly, I ran some old code through chatGPT to see what needs doing and got some great advice back, based on other best practices I have been reading about hear and there. As I am a bit slow to implement, I will have to fill you in afterward - sorry to keep you hanging. haha.

Having implemented the ability to add or edit a blog post, display a tag cloud with counts, and posts by month, I was on the verge of improving the filtering again, but I deserted my project 18 months ago when I my work days got too busy. So this time around, I am going back to basics and understanding things in baby steps - getting more familiar with syntax and alternative syntax (I had found that confusing and hard to remember with all the changes to quotes and such). I am also starting my learning with hard-coded arrays and tags and practice with variables. I am working through making dynamic links in oder to apply css dynamically based on current page. This was really my impetus for learning php in the first place, that coupled with the desire to create a CMS from scratch rather than use a commercially built product like WP, Blogger, or Joomla. The best thing about having several weeks in a row to spend an hour or two is I am beginning to think in coding logic finally, and this week started to be able to make the leap from the phased lesson to the full-strength php I had implemented with strong support from a practiced coder.

It is almost that time!

Big Garden Birdwatch 2023

The RSPB Wildlife organisation is gearing up for birders around the United Kingdom to prepare for an hour of counting!

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One of the things I love about winters in southern England is the birds. As in colder climates, and despite our milder, generally moderate weather, different birds visit the feeders in winter whom I have not seen in months.

One of my favourites is the black-capped warbler. I find them quite striking on an overcast day with their contrasting jet-black caps and evenly grey bodies. The black-capped warbler makes me proud when they fly in and land in one of the lilacs, still having some shelter, but fun to watch from the quiet indoors.

A second favourite bird which I see in groups and usually only when the weather turns is the long-tailed tit. These adorable tiny birds have very long tails and tricolour patterns which remind me of a calico tuxedo cat I used to have a decade ago. The long-tailed tits come in and also leverage the lilacs for shelter, but soon I see them on the various feeders, often going for the suet balls.