Week in Review
Published April 19, 2024
This week included a nice mix of infrastructure work and feature work. Also, a few more medicine ball exercises made it into the directory. Overall, I consider it a solid week of progress on LHF.
Exercise Directory
New Exercises
I added two medicine ball push-up exercises:
Every once in a while the perfect storm brings a new exercise to the directory. I have been wanting more push-up exercises for new ways to hit my chest. Also, I wanted to use the medicine ball more because they're fun. Then I saw someone doing medicine ball push-ups at the gym and inspiration struck.
Updated Exercises
After doing some heavy Chest Fly - Dumbbell sets, I noticed how much my biceps and inner forearm worked to stabilize my arms. I added those muscles as secondaries to all the chest fly exercises.
App Development
Caddy Server
I mentioned last week that infrastructure architecture problems prevented my newly developed exercise list filter from functioning. The problem stemmed from my decision to use two domains:
- longhaul.fitness: served the static site
- app.longhaul.fitness: proxied to a Django site where I run dynamic code
The static site serves the exercise directory but the dynamic code handled the filtering. The exercise list filter wouldn't work without bouncing a user from longhaul.fitness to app.longhaul.fitness which was an awkward experience.
Everything runs off the longhaul.fitness domain now.
While I was mucking around with servers, I dropped traefik as a proxy and nginx as a static server. Now I use Caddy for both. Caddy either serves static content or proxies to Django depending on the route. This is my first time using Caddy and I have no complaints so far. Configuration is simple and TLS certificates are automatic.
Submit an Exercise
Is your favorite exercise missing from the Exercise Directory? Add it!
Users can submit their own exercises now. My plan is to review the exercise, edit it, and add it to the directory. Your workouts get better. My workouts get better. Everybody wins.
Business Development
The "Submit an Exercise" feature opens up the exercise directory to a community. That community does not exist at the moment. I'm considering places to share links to the directory. I thought that I'd use reddit's r/fitness30plus, but after reading through the comments on a few posts, I don't see many links. I like the subreddit and don't want to get banned from it for misconduct.
A better approach than talking myself out of a few marketing options would be to try a bunch and see what works. I don't do it because I don't spend much time on the channels where I'd post: X, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Reddit, more if I thought about it. Social media isn't my thing, but how else do you spread the word to people on the internet? Something to contemplate over the coming week.