Launching A Blog Redesign, Traveling In Greece, And New Free Guide

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It took us one month to make our way back to the US dear fans but we eventually found our way 😅

The break was definitely necessary.

I was getting older by the day working my expensive hair off my head. By that point, I was producing less content than ideas 🙄

To reduce my stress, we took a little vacation to Eastern Europe and settled for a strange mix of tours in Greece.

These were local tours — everything said and done was in Greek. Can’t say I was fully aware of this when reserving the darn things.

There were lots of half-assed translations on my end to DM (who insists he speaks Greek because he was born there but understands absolutely nada).

Long story short, it was a struggle.

Worse yet was trying to sneak a pic of DM without sunglasses, a frown, or being plain weird.

And he dares wonder why he doesn’t have a decent picture for his LinkedIn profile 🙄

Anyways, between the ships, buses, planes, and donkeys we had a nice break to recharge.

…Sort of, I was partly working remotely 👩‍💻

I figured might as well have a little update post so you know we’re still kicking and can’t wait to hop back onto our coding game!

New THT site redesign is now live 🙌

Another blog site redesign?

Yes siree, you bet it is.

We redesigned The Helpful Tipper blog for the third time because I like change.

Change is good and change is necessary when you work in the perpetually changing landscape of tech.

Being ready to embrace new ideas, a new look, and quite a few new bugs is what design and development are all about.

Blog site redesign objectives

We didn’t head into this redesign cycle without a plan 🤓

No, we came prepared which is something you should always do so you don’t lose sight of your goals.

Redesigning a website isn’t an “easy” thing.

There are so many different aspects and elements to consider so a plan is downright a necessity to avoid overwhelm and intimidation.

This round of redesign was inspired by three objectives:

1) Solidify THT’s theme and brand

I admit that the only thing we knew for sure about THT was its name and purpose (i.e. learning how to code).

Other than those two aspects, we had no concept in mind, no logo or theme, or color palette 👉👈

Ever since we launched The Helpful Tipper those details were slowly filled in based on preferences and inspiration.

During this redesign, I broke DM’s heart (just a little) by retiring our astronaut mascot.

We are not “exploring the digital universe” any longer because we are learning how to move through it first.

As the goal of THT solidified into a blog where we share our coding journey and knowledge, we realized our claims required simplification.

So here we are, one astronaut short but 100% certain of our mission, your needs, and the brand that is THT.

2) Create opportunities for more line drawings

There’s one element I didn’t retire and that’s the line drawings.

I’m the main artist behind them so please be kind in your comments.

I consider them with a pride that is bound to make DM’s eyes roll right out of their sockets if he keeps on rolling them so.

Whatever thoughts we might have on the matter of line drawings, they’re a unique aspect of THT.

They add a personal touch and make our relationship more intimate, no?

After all, I take considerable time making them so we can give you a better glimpse at our lives 🙂

Coding might be technical but what newbies in the world of tech don’t realize until fully immersed is that we spend lots of time cooperating.

Building digital products, writing code, debugging, testing, and designing are all collaborative activities that require teamwork!

You and THT aren’t just a person reading from a screen – we’re here to support each other so we can be the best versions of ourselves one tag at a time 😉

3) Build an email subscription list

Building a list out of your readers is something any of my bloggers out there just “get”.

It’s nice if y’all follow us on our socials (please do, we’re spunky!) but if one of those platforms goes kaput one day, we absolutely don’t want to sink with the ship 🛳

When you give us the pleasure of sending you our blog updates and spontaneously fabulous communications (now and then, I promise we don’t spam), we’ll never lose you.

And we don’t want to lose you because we’ve such a long, happy journey ahead of us.

So that’s the long-winded explanation of why we took extra care to choose an email provider that won’t drive me crazy.

We ditched Mailchimp and found a new email provider 🤫

We started off with Mailchimp because it’s so popular in the blogging world.

I’m afraid my developer brain never got around to their dashboard UI. I couldn’t make heads or tails of their system even though it looks all pretty and sensible.

At the end of the day, Mailchimp wasn’t intuitive in the least and that made me dread doing anything related to email lists.

It took a single Google search to realize there were plenty of other email providers we could try, one of which is Mailerlite, our current provider.

I confess to having had a relatively nice experience setting up our first campaign and welcome automation.

Definitely, a pleasurable experience compared to the ordeal that was Mailchimp.

Let’s hope we keep on having good luck with it so you get our communications and upcoming resources reliably!

Launching our first free quick guide

You can get our free Git Commands Quick Guide by signing up for our THT Newsletter.

It’s our first free resource, a special gift curated by yours truly to help anyone starting out, or plain working with, Git.

By itself, the Git Commands Quick Guide is based on our upcoming Git Commands With Examples eBook.

The eBook will go into more detail on the different Git processes alongside examples of the steps you need to push, pull, merge, add, commit and do stuff with Git.

We aim to make it your main resource to reference when working with a GitHub repo and your local machine.

Learning Git isn’t hard if you practice and have a good resource at your disposal!

I recommend you start with the basic command line to do things like navigate across directories, create files, etc. before diving into Git.

That’s just enough time for me to finish writing the best eBook on Git you’ll ever find (#confidence) so we all become Terminal masterminds 😎

In the meantime, if you need to actually use Git for your projects or would like to get a head start, download our free Git Commands Quick Guide and get coding!