A Productive Start to the Year
Today was one of those days where everything just clicked. Seven distinct tasks completed across the infrastructure, from launching a brand new blog to decommissioning unused services.
Blog Launch
The big one: blog.aj-desk.com is now live. It's a deliberately simple architecture - PHP reading JSON files from a /posts/ directory. No CMS, no database, no WordPress. Just clean PHP with a markdown parser, tag support, and reading time estimates. The dark theme matches the rest of aj-desk.com.
Why JSON files? Because they're trivially easy to generate from n8n automation workflows. Drop a JSON file in the directory and the blog picks it up. That's the entire deployment story.
AJ Consulting Website Refresh
The main aj-consulting.uk site got a proper reorganisation into three service categories: Business & Digital Services, Smart Home & Technology, and Additional Services. The hero section, about page, contact form, and footer all got refreshed while keeping the established dark/red theme.
TechLiberation.uk Goes Live
Deployed a privacy-focused smart home services site with an interactive dark room landing page - the cursor acts as a flashlight revealing content. It includes a live weather widget via the Open-Meteo API (GDPR-compliant, no tracking) and thermostat/smart bulb simulations.
Multi-tenant Job Scraper
Designed and built a multi-user job scraping system. A PHP API endpoint manages user configurations, and an n8n workflow handles the actual scraping with user-specific filtering and per-user Planka board creation.
FreeScout Decommissioned
Container 215 (FreeScout) was backed up and stopped. Zero tickets processed, no access logs - it was completely unused since Planka took over as the ticketing solution. Container preserved in stopped state just in case.
Remote Support Solution
Deployed Jitsi Meet (Container 219) for browser-based video and screen sharing. RustDesk was decommissioned since it requires UDP which Cloudflare tunnels don't support. The new approach is two-tier: Jitsi for screen viewing, DWService for full remote control.
Tech Reviews and More
Completed reviews of the legal footer links system, task reminder automation, and website audit. Fixed the n8n Claude Task Processor environment variable access issue. Created a Daily Blog Summary Generator workflow and a job search labelling system.
All told, a solid foundation day for the year ahead.