Schalk van Dyk

12/11/2026

🌿 **A website makeover project I've been working on!**

I've been keeping busy with a little website redesign project featuring **Bosveld Rus Guest Farm**.

I started with a deliberately outdated website mockup and decided to give it a complete modern makeover! 💻🎨

From the layout and typography to the colours, navigation and overall user experience, I've been working on transforming the original design into something fresh, modern and welcoming.

There's still plenty of work to do, but I'm really happy with how the new design is taking shape! 🚀

🎬 I'm also busy editing and preparing a series of videos for my YouTube channel, where I'll be documenting the entire redesign process — from the initial makeover and design decisions to the actual coding and development.

I'll be sharing the challenges, creative process and everything that goes into bringing a website to life.

👀 So keep an eye out for more!

📺 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/

09/11/2026

04/11/2026

💻 **A small discovery in web development today!** 🚀

🔍 I've been troubleshooting an intermittent issue with a Node.js application hosted on cPanel. Newly saved slideshows weren't always appearing immediately in the slideshow library, even though the files were successfully written to the server.

🛠️ After investigating the filesystem, Express routes and server logs, I decided to look at browser caching.

💡 The solution was surprisingly simple: HTTP cache-control headers instructing the browser and intermediary caches not to store or reuse outdated HTML responses.

🌐 A good reminder that sometimes the problem isn't your code or your server – it's how the browser handles the response.

📚 **Lesson learned:** Don't just investigate what your application does. Investigate how the entire environment handles it.

✅ One problem solved, and another useful lesson learned!

🚀

18/06/2026

Figure out the puzzle.... and you'll see the bigger picture. Just sayin....

03/06/2026

You know what's frustrating?

Getting pulled away from a project to focus on other things, then coming back later and spending half the day trying to remember what on earth you were doing. 😅

Sometimes the biggest challenge isn't writing the code—it's getting back into the mindset you had when you wrote it.

It's all coming back to me now..... 😅

01/06/2026

🚀 Working on a fully optimized setup for SEO, social sharing, and performance.

This is part of improving how my website communicates with search engines and social platforms — making sure everything is structured properly for visibility, previews, and speed.

So far it includes:

SEO-focused title & meta description
Open Graph tags for better link previews (Facebook, WhatsApp, LinkedIn)
Twitter Card support
Basic performance improvements (fonts & preconnects)
Clean structure for better indexing

Small code decisions, big impact over time. 💻⚡
Still refining, still improving.

01/06/2026

Monday mayhem came back to haunt me....
What I thought was sorted wasn't really sorted....
Hopefully, now it is! Let's see. I'll know at 15h30

30/05/2026

I've had one or two flat tires this week 🛞😅, but they didn't stop me. They may have slowed me down, but they never took me off the road. 💪🚗

Every challenge brought a solution, every setback taught a lesson, and every obstacle became an opportunity to keep moving forward. 🔧✨

The journey isn't about avoiding problems—it's about finding a way through them. Onward and upward! 🚀🙌

27/05/2026

Lately, it feels like there just aren’t enough hours in the day for everything that’s important. Still, Monday mayhem is officially behind me… and honestly, conquering that beast feels like a win. 💪🤓