Plant care for beginners

With Plant care for beginners I'm sharing my experiences about caring for plants. I want to help to educate others about keeping their plants healthy and how to help them thrive. The goal is to write about plants I actually care for myself, so I can write about all kinds of tips and tricks that you may not know if you just copy and paste other guides.

What's my role in this project?

My role in this project is doing everything, from design work, creating content and sharing this on social media. This has already taught me a lot about reaching the target audience in a place they hang out, in this case Instagram.

Tools used

To accomplish this goal, there were several tools I used:

• PHP (laravel)
• SCSS (+tailwindcss)

Yes, that's really it. This project is a flat file website. This means that I don't make use of a database, but all configuration and content is saved into files on the server. These files are parsed to generate meta tags and HTML articles.

Automation

Because I like to work with API's and automate a lot of processes, I've done a fair amount of automation for this project. Everything from pulling in the Instagram feed, to publishing articles, generating sitemaps, and generating an RSS feed is all done automatically. The only thing I have to do is create content and the system does the rest for me.

Pulling in the Instagram posts

When the Instagram feed is pulled in, I keep track of the post URL, image URL, and the post date. These are all saved in JSON files, so I can just parse that and serve the content on the homepage. There is no API connection necessary to display these images. The Instagram API is currently accessed once a day through a cronjob. All the new posts and updated posts are saved to the JSON file and the changes are committed to Git with a clear commit message.

Publishing the blog posts

All blog post meta data is saved in a JSON file, this file also contains the publish date and whether the post has been published or not. A cronjob checks the system every day if a post needs to be published. If it does, then it'll mark the post as published, generate a sitemap, generate an updated RSS feed, and commit all the changes to Git with a clear message. This is very nice, because I never have to think about publishing a post manually again and submitting it to Google to index. Yes it even submits the sitemap to Google automatically.