2020 Week 9

UX/UI Talk

On Thursday my sister and I were at a UX/UI talk from the company Liechtenecker. We learned a lot about UI patterns, forms, layouts, user testing and so on. The talk was 4+ hours long so it was a little bit too much for our brains 😂But we made a lot of photos of the slides and I also made some notes.

Directly after the talk, we knew that we must redo the design of our websites. We began with the redesign but there is a lot of work until it is done and the websites are changed.

I am not a typical designer but I really like learning more in that area. I would call myself a Fullstack Developer so I should (and want) know more about it.

Added the blog posts to the sitemap

When I created this blog I didn´t have that much time, so I could not add all wanted features. For that reason, I now added all the blog posts to the XML sitemap to make them more indexable. I saw in the google webmaster tools that google found my blog posts but said that it could not find them in the sitemap. So I think the sitemap is not needed to be indexed on google but it has some benefits. For example, the last modified date which tells google if the page has changed. Also, the structure is very easy and so it took me only a few minutes to add the blog posts to it.

Wireguard VPN

Between my servers at home and the hosted ones, I have a VPN. A few months ago I added an OPNsense firewall to my home network and since then, I planned to move the VPN to the firewall (until now the VPN server was on one of my home servers). Because I read and heard so much good about the new Wireguard VPN I thought that I could also switch from OpenVPN to Wireguard. There is a plugin for OPNsense which made it really easy to set up the server. The client-side was also very easy to set up so it took me only about an hour until everything was running.

I have nothing against OpenVPN and I also never had any problems with it, but I read so much good about Wireguard that I had to check it out. The setup is way easier than with OpenVPN and also the performance is great. The new setup is now running over 24 hours and everything works great. I hope it stays that way.

Server and infrastructure work

The work on my servers and also my infrastructure continues and I need some more time for that. I want to restructure many things, make them clearer and easier to understand. Also, I try to make them easier to operate because I do everything myself. Docker helps with a lot of things but it needs time to migrate everything.

I hope that I can finish that in a few weeks because there are so many other things I would like to do. But currently, the priority is on building a great infrastructure I can rely on.

The things I write on this blog are my own opinions and based on the things I learned running my own infrastructure or building my personal projects. It stands in no connection with my job.