Site Updates – Words from fallingstuff

Happy New Year .. a little late

No it is not the first of the year .. it is more around 3 weeks into the new year. I have not been in a coma all this time, although I have been sick with some kind of crud. No, I have spent the last 2ish months trying to put good reasoning behind why I did not achieve my personal goals in 2023 and 2024, watching what I have been doing and more importantly how do I do better for 2025… Let me explain.

I have a bad habit of over analyzing everything to the point of stagnation (yep, old school analysis paralysis) but I have taken it a step further and tried to put everything into small VERY specific categories, but then I forget the categories. I also have a habit of putting things onto a VERY specific schedule – “I will only do X on Y day”, meaning I have cut out the flexibility if something interrupts that schedule usually this is work affecting personal projects. Wrap it all up with my planning has not accommodated for the above meaning I forget what I am working on because I missed the release time and then forgot what I was working on.

This year I am changing up how I approach these things – all my projects are being pulled under a new, more generic title – Fallingworks, my site has always been about things I was doing … and since the things that I do tend to be all over the place, the new title is fitting. Plus, as a side note, the name change leans into more collaboration. I spent the last 2ish months putting together a list of all the ideas that I want to work on, including things that I was already working on… Big list of everything, just pick something that piques my interest then only mark it off when it is done, whatever and whenever that is. The last things I have are to make a weekly ‘status’ post for accountability and to keep things somewhat on track.

I have a lot on the plan for 2025 both personally and professionally, it is going to be an exciting year.

Fixing the Automattic Connection

Today’s post is going to be a relatively short one, something had broke on the site and the fix was quite simple. For the longest time I used a Jetpack plugin from Automattic to share to social medias for me as I stopped routinely checking Facebook and Twitter. One day back last year (around that June time frame) I realized that these posts were not getting made consistently. After doing some digging I realized why – Automattic had monetized the once free Jetpack social plugin, now the “free plan” only allowed for 30 shares a month.

Maybe I missed the announcement and am just ranting incoherently for no reason, but … I am not paying for a service that I was using for free that the new boss decided should be making more money… profiteering gluttons. Of course, the list of alternatives was very short and disappointing since almost all were geared toward letting visitors share posts to THEIR social media instead of automatically sharing posts to YOUR social medias. In the end I landed on Social Media Auto Publish from XYZScripts.

This plugin is giving me the same publishing options I had before and for free too, with the caveat that I needed to do a little “developer” work to connect to the various social services. What I needed to do was quite simple and documented (so I will not go into the details here), however the company that produces the plugin allows an option to let them do the setup work for me for a small fee. With that the site is back up and broadcasting out to the social platforms of the world.

So .. about 2024

Well, something obviously happened last year .. but the specific details are a bit of a blur. I know what did happen was definitely NOT according to the plan from last year. Looking back, last year became a mess of shifting priorities (in both my personal and professional life) and tasks lost to not being written down. In short, I would be working on something, get distracted, and the ideas got lost. Finally, somewhere around June / July, when I took some time off work, content posting got more or less put on hold.

Now, being a new year, the work begins again starting with a few things last year that never got to post – those are being drafted now – and then I have a list of things I want to work on, so the year is looking strong so far. The goal again is 52 Musics, 52 Memerys, and 26 content posts. As an added challenge – an extra 20 Musics, 25 Memerys, and 13 content posts to catch up from last year. (Clarification – a content post is something requiring at least some research or work on my part – reactions to news topics or slinging pictures up do not count.)

So here’s to the New Year … may she be a damn sight better than the old.

An Update to an Update

As of this morning, the transfer of fallingstuff.com is now complete and my website has the .com and .net. It is a little thing, but it feels like an accomplishment and I am super excited.

Updating updates of update

… or how I learned to stop worrying and love buying a domain. Wait …

I have been working late the last couple weeks, and so this week a follow up on something I had have been working on for a few months. Back when I started using fallingstuff as my nom de plume I went to update my website with a new fallingstuff domain. I quickly found out that the .com was already in use as a redirect to a blogger blog for a programmer who wrote a screen saver by the name of “falling stuff”.

I was a little put out at the time but kept on going with the .net domain and kept on going. Fast forward to earlier this year and I found that the domain was available and up for auction, for more money than I was willing to spend at the time, so I waited. I waited until the auction was just about up (around 2 months) and then put an offer down … which was countered almost a week later for the full amount of the domain. After some debate I decided it was not worth trying to fight some parking company that appeared to not be concerned with negotiating and, well, I really wanted the .com … So I bought it.

Out of paranoia I kept it all under my hat until I could get the name transferred to hosting I felt more comfortable with. It turns out that ICANN (the global domain registrar) has rules about how often you can change the companies that host domain names. I am jumping the gun a bit but I will finally be able to move the name from godaddy to the registrar that backs my webhost within about a week and I am very excited.

Now … If I ever think about doing this again … well I am going to think twice. Dealing with domain name auctions and transferring registrars is a pain .. and I only do this for fun.

Now for the Clip Show

Last year was not a great year, it blew by too fast and I did missed a lot of things that I should have gotten done. This year has started to feel like that same cycle was starting to repeat … except this time I have been making .. *some* progress. Seeing as how I do not have a particular topic prepared but about a hundred little things recently completed or in flight I thought I would do something a little different for a Tuesday post … In the interest of my sanity, I am taking this loop off.

Work has actually been a bit nuts for the last month and change – not bad, just going in 100 directions at the same time. Combine that with some some wonderfully frustrating health issues and I have been bouncing from thing to thing trying to keep my mind going and feeling that delightful every day is the same as yesterday. So looking at the back log of missed posts I am skipping a loop, catching up, and filling in the blanks.

I made a rule last year not to do post fill posts but seeing as how my social media connectors broke back in December, not sure anyone would have noticed the not so quality Wasteland, Civilization, or Windows 11 posts. Sure they were posts that back filled all the missing ones so far this year, but they are ripe to be revisited .. especially since I forgot about half of what I actually was going to write for them. I am a bit disappointed both in the writing and the fact that the connectors broke until I pay money for a different subscription … future post territory.

Domain changes are in the works for both the fallingstuff and gotchtech sites, once the dust settles on all that I will have another update. Cop out on the subject, yes, but I feel like talking about it more will just invite gremlins to screw it all up – since I already have some really bad feelings about what is in flight.

The last major thing that is going on right now is the Workshop. This is a new place for topics of interest and self hosting servers. I am just getting it off the ground so there is not much to see but really excited about it and the potential for what I can do with it and how much it will help my training goals for the year.

I cannot guarantee I will not edit this post between now and the next update with more goings on but for now, I pick up my dust pan and broom and clean up more construction debris.

Good Riddance 2022

Dear 2023, you are up … do not screw it up.

Here’s to the New Year .. may she be a damn sight better than the old one.

Looking back 2022 was a blur, I cannot say for sure what happened, aside from the fact that goals did not get accomplished as planned, things got backed up, shoved to the side … but for the life of me I have no idea why (hence those random psychological term posts – self research trying to figure out). Where as normally I would have complained and tried to make up some kind of excuse, 2023 is not going to be like that. This year I am going to be better (note that concrete statement there … “Going to be”).

A few months ago I finally reached the breaking point (so to speak). You know those little ticks that everyone has, those annoying little quirks or habits that we dismiss in ourselves … like a constant “well I will go to sleep a little later tonight, I will be fine” only to wake up the next day late and feeling horrible. Cannot relate to that, how about the junk drawer – you know that drawer of stuff that gets put somewhere because you cannot remember what it was for. Do not have one of those either? Well I have a few of those ticks and, yeah its time to give those things up – started to make the changes at the end of 2022, working on getting into a routine to help with the lack of sleep and all that. Also started on that whole “junk drawer” thing clearing out old components and bits that I bought forever ago and forgot why I bought them… and if any of them even still work.

It will be a fun year, and for now all I will share is that I am planning to make the blog goal again this year of 52 Musics, 52 Memerys, and 26 content posts, at the bare minimum… Now time to get writing. Stay tuned and happy 2023…

Here again

Hi again, I am still around been a little on the busy side in the not blog world … So here is what has been going on –

Work, had a few projects that got ended up taking more time that I expected and would up needing overtime to get caught up, ’cause bills got to get paid. Never fails to surprise me how fast these things stack up. Especially when they all drop at the same time.
I took some personal time to clean up some old crates from when we moved south years ago. It was a crap time in my life and very much over, but these crates had a lot of memories of my dad and when I was growing up – and I really wanted to get them cleaned up.
I have been working on my project to split out my technical educational content out to my splinter site that I mentioned back in my Intermission update
I have been working on this ridiculous project about recovering data from hard drives on eBay … and for the Love of all that is Holy, scope creep is a thing …

Well that is all for now – more coming really soon, I was getting cleaning up drafts posts to get caught up with my content and saw this was still a draft and decided to get it cleaned up for the world to see.

Till later

Intermission..

So, it has been a minute, I got sick a few weeks back (weather changes get me every year and tends to make me miserable for a month or two) and then got somewhat sidetracked by work stuff. I assure you dear reader, I was not completely avoiding my duty as blog type creator … just slacking… a little.

A few years back, I decided to make a go at making this site 100% professional, I had a different domain name and different content. I never could quite get it to land the way I wanted to thought and I pulled that domain and all under the FallingStuff umbrella … During my recent absence, I got to thinking about it and took some time to spin that name out from under the this main site to its own hosting. I really wanted to give some focus to the more education and knowledge I started creating here and felt like it would get lost in the noise that is memes and music and game stuff and whatever other weirdness that interested me. So, gotchtech.com was spun off to house that tutorial and focused content – the spot I reserved to share knowledge and wisdom I have gathered on the computer machines.

I have a boatload of topics that I can create posts about, so content to fill both of these two blogs on at least some kind of schedule should not be a problem. I find myself slightly behind on writing so I need to get caught up to keep in line with the goals I had wanted to meet this year, plus after splitting out the tutorial bits I feel more comfortable writing things that are more on the personal side, thoughts, feelings, etc. so that will be coming.

That is all I have for the moment, I am still in the process of gathering thoughts and organizing notes to get back on it after being distracted – more to come.

Somewhat of an update

So … it turns out I missed a week, making up for a double music, double meme this week and it turns out just a week off for the rest of the content. Quick math puts me a post behind. I had the prep work done on the post that I wanted to write, about the effectiveness of the Windows 10 reset process, but I got wrapped up in projects and lost my train of thought.

Lesson I took away from January though – Not every post has to be perfectly scheduled and so it is ok to run behind, not everything or everyone is perfect. Still have a few things to settle to get back on schedule, but more to come.