It's been a long two days but the site's ready to launch.

I've used Laravel 7.29 and Vue 2.6 for the development not just because I'm comfortable with the combination, and it meant I could deliver the site quickly and easily, but because higher versions of Laravel require higher versions of PHP and higher versions of Vue can be tricky.

The upgrade from my current PHP version, 7.2.31, to version 8 (looking forward to union types, the new str_functions and asynchronous disk writes with fsync/fsyncdata) on Ubuntu 18.04 has been put off for a while...and I still have one medium-sized project outstanding that I'm tempted to get done to clear the decks before heading off into an app-get dependency freefall that might even end up in the full distro upgrade to the latest LTS (20.04) that I've also been putting off until any early bugs were ironed out. Still, there's a few spare disks loitering about, so I might pop one in and install the stack between commits on the other project...so very few hours in a day...

*Update* I have now updated my PHP version and am looking at updating the site from Laravel 7 to Laravel 8