u/AberrantNarwal

Used to frequent the DIY Drones space back in the 2010's and was into the hobby side of it a bit.

Recently had the incling to look into what the drone inspection/surveying landscape was here in the NW of the UK as it's an industrial/agricultural zone.

However I'm coming at this with no experience in the value-proposition and deliverables.

Current bonus is living near a working farm with potential contacts to understand what problems could be solved if any.

I have a DJI mavic camera drone and will be looking at testing out some basic mapping this weekend.

It seems like all the pieces are generally available with a bit of investment - drone platforms, lidar, IR, software etc, it's stiching it together into a package that delivers something valuable and easy for potential customers and then marketing.

Of course I'm not expecting to get into this with a consumer camera drone and a prayer - just looking for advice from those who've been there on whether there's too much friction/saturation in the idea to get serious.

Hi all, 32[M], in the UK and living with my family - no drivers license. Thinking I would share my current situation here on reddit as a form of therapy.

First to set the fun scene: basically I was stuck in a religious cult (JWs) my entire life - and knew it - effectively hamstringing me socially/emotionally in the process.

Thankfully my family woke up a couple of years ago allowing me to fully leave too - the side-effect of course being that we’re shunned by essentially everyone I’ve known.

I am very grateful to have had a job for 8 years working in ecommerce - a job that was made available because of those connections I’ve since lost.

During that time I also started my own ecommerce store with my family, into which I poured my savings (and not taken a penny out).

Things got rough at my job in 2024 and it was a slow (stressful) decline until I was made redundant at the end of 2025.

A few months after redundancy there was a notice of eviction from our rental - with nothing available locally we had to look further away - having to move 5 family members and 2 kids + our ecommerce stock.

As this is all happening I was having legal trouble with our store and had to change it basically erasing all the progress made in the last 4 years - wiping out any chance of making a living from it and leaving me struggling to pay it’s debts + legal fees.

Now all the while through this I've been quietly smug because I had some coding skills in my back pocket - a reason I got through the 8 year grind at my job was because I took care of the tech-side and was deemed valuable enough to keep on.

Well, in the past few months I’ve had to have a reality check on my “skills“ and realise that those 8 years had a lot of “busy“ work and not as many best practices as I would like.

That was my plan-b, go into some software role - and now I’m watching in real time the industry get actively destroyed with the force of the entire economy - people with far more experience than me struggling.

So here I am at 32, basically out of savings, in an isolated location which is hard to commute to/from with no drivers and with what would probably safely be deemed “anxiety“ issues.

There was a fleeting moment in those 8 years where I almost peeked over at the next tier up on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, just for a moment - but it looks like I’m now back down to the old food and shelter tier.

Currently I’m soldiering on, trying to build my portfolio for what it’s worth, and a side project - but I’ve lost a lot of weight, I don’t leave the house (it’s hard to get anywhere) and can actually feel the hum of stress/cortisol pumping through me. Getting out of bed has been really difficult since the move as I’m feeling exhausted/drained and I can’t imagine trudging out and getting a local 9-5, although this is likely what I’m going to have to look at real soon.

Anyway, thanks for reading! I’m sure there are plenty in worse situations here so if that’s you I can only say I am sorry and I feel a bit of your pain.

I suppose for me the next step will be to book in some therapy.

Hi there,

I'm playing around with a custom block-only theme and a fresh install of WooCommerce - some real basic out of the box stuff.

I've added some attributes (e.g. "Brand") and assigned them to a couple of products.

However it appears there is no way to get my new "Brand" attribute to display as a dropdown selector. There are only two options for display - "list" and "chips".

Neither of which are viable options for any store with more than a handful of products as the sidebar gets cluttered.

Hello!

I'm building out a bare-bones block theme to try and learn what's going on under the hood.

First I've got to say I'm running into difficulty. Any tutorials/guides including the official theme handbook seem to be slightly out of date using theme.json v2. Finding a logical resource walking from step A to B seems to be an impossibility.

The mixing of theme.json, inline styles, style.css and annotated html comments to define how the site looks has got me questioning my sanity.

The tutorial I've been following already seems to require fighting against the wordpress css by overriding just to get full width content to work. I'm at a loss for words, this is just basic html layout with some css.

Basically without going on too much it seems like all of this hoopla is to make the content editable to the lay-man. Otherwise things would be so much easier with a classic theme.

So the real roadbloack I've run into so far is with the navigation. Specifically, I don't see a way at all that it will be possible to add a mega-menu without simply hardcoding it in, or making use of a Mega Menus-type plugin, which seem to not make use of blocks anyway.

Creating a mega-menu that works with FSE seems like it will be far more work than creating a basic theme itself.

My current plan is to simply make a separate mega-menu plugin to hardcode the megamenu navigation for now to take care of mega-menu functionality while unfortunately going against the FSE ethos here.

I'm curious to know how block theme developers are handling FSE and Mega Menus?

Hello!

Here's what I'm not understanding about Docker:

You have to essentially write out the environment for each project, so you will have a docker-compose file that will potentially change from one project to the next.

Say over time you have 10 projects, your oldest project is maybe running an outdated version of php described in the docker file. Or maybe some setting has changed... and this happens on each project.

How do you keep each docker configuration, of which there are now 10, up to date and in sync?

Maybe keep a repo with your up to date WordPress-Docker config and pull it down to each project?

Thanks!

I have an ongoing issue with WooCommerce and Google Merchant Center - we are syncing our products with GMC using the official Google for WooCommere plugin which apparently uses the Content API to sync product information.

This is all working except for there constantly being 5-15 products in our 1000+ product catalogue that are marked as dissapproved in google merchante center -> products -> needs attention due this error: "Product page unavailable"

This is very frustrating because often it's some of our top performing products being disallowed. Now we have never been able to reproduce this issue and it rotates between product / not always the same products. I have never been able to catch an actually unavailable product page as these pages are perfectly accesible on my machine always.

However google seems to constantly be flagging a fraction of my catalogue as unavailable which is beyond frustrating as it affects our ad performance and sales through them. What I have to do is almost daily go into merchant center and manually request a website check - after which it will say that all the issues are resolved or maybe 1-2 remaining products are still saying "Page unavailable" however then quickly after a couple of hours the unavailable product pages start creeping up again until the next 12 hour reset and I can manually check again.

This seems to be some very frustrating technical issue with their crawler maybe timing out or who knows what - but whats most frustrating is the lack of accountability from google merchant team when trying to raise this issue.

Also there is simply no way to debug or reproduce this issue to see what is triggering the crawler to flag a page as unavailable - as google does not provide logs or diagnostics for these pages being unavailable. I just can't see a way to raise this issue and escalate it with google ads/merchant center to finally resolve it once and for all. Our xwf Google Stratagist just says they can't help with anything at all Merchant Center - and the chat is a joke.

Just got an email about new terms from Klaran rolling out - under section 14.1 it says:

>14.1 In relation to all Shopping Solutions: The Merchant warrants that during the term of the Agreement, in the Store or any other agreed Sales Channels, Klarna shall be the Merchant’s sole provider of deferred payments and installment solutions in the countries covered by this Agreement. For the avoidance of doubt, this means the Merchant agrees that it will not integrate nor directly or indirectly offer, promote or otherwise facilitate any third party services nor any own services (neither solely by itself nor in cooperation with any third party) that offer Customers the ability to defer their payments or split their payments into installments in any country where the Merchant has agreed to integrate the Shopping Solutions. Notwithstanding the foregoing, the Merchant is allowed to keep backup/failover solutions. For clarity, the Merchant is permitted to continue offering services that (i) allow customers to make an upfront payment in full as well as major credit cards (e.g. Visa, MasterCard, American Express) or (ii) allow customers, after their purchases have been completed with the Merchant, to convert the payment into credit installments within a provider’s own environment.

So basically if I continue to offer Klarna they expect me to stop offering Clearpay/PayPal Pay Later.....?

Am I supposed to just sit here and hope they don't enforce it? Mind-bending stuff.

I'm not sure what has happened and am certain I changed my account to a personal one not too long ago.

Under Settings & Privacy -> Account there is no longer the option to switch account type. It's just saying:

• Verification
• Business verification
• TikTok Shop for Seller

On my profile page I am seeing TikTok Studio | Your Orders | Showcase as is I have a commercial account it seems.

I can't access non-commercial sounds and it's really annoying!

I also paid for CapCut Pro yesterday and linked the TikTok account to CapCut so not sure if this is what cooked my goose.

What an absolutely time-consuming nightmare of a run-around!!!

I'm not sure what has happened and am certain I changed my account to a personal one not too long ago.

Under Settings & Privacy -> Account there is no longer the option to switch account type. It's just saying:

• Verification
• Business verification
• TikTok Shop for Seller

On my profile page I am seeing TikTok Studio | Your Orders | Showcase as is I have a commercial account it seems.

I can't access non-commercial sounds and it's really annoying!

I also paid for CapCut Pro yesterday and linked the TikTok account to CapCut so not sure if this is what cooked my goose.

What an absolutely time-consuming nightmare of a run-around!!!

In 10 years of being aware of Gihub for the first time I'm trying out actions to deploy a simple php application because why not try it out today! It's 32 degrees outside!

And this is the exact 60-minute hour on gods green earth that github actions is down!

Hi all,

I'm using Laragon for local development and currently learning Symfony. SymfonyCasts has been great so far.

I recently learned about using a bare Git repository with multiple git worktree checkouts, and I'm wondering whether anyone uses this workflow when developing Symfony apps locally.

Normally, if I create a project at:

www/my-project

Laragon automatically gives me a local domain like:

https://my-project.test

But with a bare repo / worktree setup, I imagine the structure would be more like:

www/my-project/
  repo.git/
  main/
    public/
  feature-1/
    public/
  feature-2/
    public/

Since Symfony's document root needs to point to each worktree's public/ directory, I'm not sure what the best local setup would be.

Do people usually create a separate Apache virtual host for each worktree, for example:

my-project-main.test      -> www/my-project/main/public
my-project-feature-1.test -> www/my-project/feature-1/public

Or is there a better/common way to use Git worktrees with Symfony and Laragon?

I'm mainly trying to avoid constantly switching branches in one working copy, while still being able to test different worktrees easily in the browser.

Thanks!

The course and instructor themselves are brilliant, however this is a challenging course for me that a). takes a lot of willpower to sit down b) is quite difficult to find the time to do.

Since I started a couple of weeks ago it's been the most horrible experience I've ever had learning anything online. I've not gone two lectures without having to refresh my browser to get the video to start playing.

I dread having to pause the video to take any notes or think because invariable that will be it for 5-10 minutes as I try gettting the video to play again.

Moving the video back a little to hear a section again is the same story - the playback will just stop and refreshing the entire page and finding my place again is a 50/50 - by the time I've got the damn thing to play again my train of thought, concentration and willpower are SHOT and abstract thinking is RUINED.

On top of this the entire platform has been completely offline for huge chunks of the day over the past few weeks. The Udemy status report history is an absolute lie as most of those days it's had some sort of bigger issue where their website has not even been accesible at all.

I'm going to IMPLORE the creator of this excellent course that I'm doing to host the course on their own website where I will gladly pay 10x the amount to take it over Udemy.

I would also highly recommend anyone who has had their time wasted and schedule disrupted by this incompetent company to leave an honest review of their experience on Trustpilot.

I can't put into words what a poor experience it's been trying to use Udemy in the last few days. For a website that just has to play a video I just don't understand how they can be so incompetent. I've tried clearing all caches, running on a clean browser but every second video will just stop in the middle of playback. I'm finding the course quite fast paced and challenging and these constant interruptions to my thinking make me want to punch a hole through the screen.

I'd recommend their dev team take a few courses on youtube!