Relatively speaking, for one person at least, I set up a lot of PCs, and Macs, and a few WordPress sites, all for clients. Much of the foundation work is repetitive. For example, I don’t use a custom Windows install disk so I end up installing (and uninstalling, of course) a lot of software. For WordPress sites, I end up installing themes and plugins time and time again.
Logging into a variety of different sites to download applications and agents, etc. is tedious. To do it more efficiently I could log into my password manager but I don’t want to do that on customer devices, even those I manage and control.
I do use an RMM for my Windows installs, and that allows me to deploy many apps from a single source, plus any from Ninite Pro. But, I still have to get my RMM agent on the end-point plus other apps not included in my RMM or Ninite Pro.
With WordPress I could set up a template, but I have multiple WordPress hosts, not all have this feature and updating multiple templates would in itself be time-consuming.
I could also use my Dropbox, Google Drive, OwnCloud, etc, but, again, I’d rather avoid logging in with these credentials on third-party devices, where possible.
Therefore, I’ve decided to set-up my own downloads site, containing all the stuff I regularly install.
It’ll be private, WordPress of course, using Anders Norén’s McLuhan WordPress theme. I’m hoping the site will save me a lot of time.
It’s currently in dev. That’s the time-consuming part but once done it should pay me back in time (literally and figuratively).
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