As you probably read last month, I’ve moved to the Philippines earlier this month. I’ve been here for a few weeks now and I like it. The country is pretty laid-back, at-least in Puerto Galera, Mindoro. Not so much in Calapan, a nearby City. Earlier today I announced to the hotel I’m in that I’ll be staying another month.
Moving to a new place also means a lot of figuring out needs to be done. New routines, new workflows. Discovering stuff you thought you’d prepare for but didn’t.
Working offline
For instance; I’ve prepared a fully functional webserver and DNS setup on my laptop so that I can develop plugins such as AdRotate without needing internet at all. This allows me to do some things while on a plane, ferry or when there is a blackout.
Turns out that WordPress deems it necessary to load common fonts from Google instead of relying on system fonts. Safari and Firefox completely lock up when they can’t reach those fonts. Which completely defeats the purpose of my development environment.
The solution: Write a plugin that removes those fonts. And to make up for it, reference a local cache of fonts I’ve created. Themes now work just as well and I no longer need to be online to load a development site.
New routines
Emails need to be handled, invoices processed. The support forum needs attention a few times a week. And none of it can be done between lunch and midnight – go figure… 🙂 So, I’m checking up on stuff between 6am and 10am, maybe some more around midnight. The afternoons are then automatically reserved for the fun the Philippines has to offer. Which in a way is good. But taking a lazy day and deciding to go online all day is probably not going to happen.
