Tag: future plans

October 23, 2024 – Foreshadowing

October 23, 2024 /

I started this endeavor for a number of reasons. I wanted to create a lifestyle business where my life was my work and vice versa. I have been a long time listener of The Survival Podcast and this is one of the things the host encourages for personal freedom. Another tenant is that is one or more people can do something and be successful then there is certainly a market and likely I can do it too.

When I quit my job in April 2019, it was not to explicitly do this but that it was a perfect opportunity to have the time to figure it out. The truth is, I didn’t use my time effectively and I didn’t get moving until December. I got behind the gun in 2020 and I had this huge project of remodeling my little house and then I had to go back to work. In that time, I created a formula to test whether I could actually do this.

I actually got my domain name in the fall of 2020. That is where I switched from Floricane on free WordPress to AltF4.co. I guess this is where today’s story starts. I got my renewal notice a couple of weeks ago. Hosting is now over $400 a year. When I first started, it was around $200 per year. I started asking myself, do I want this bad enough to keep paying hosting fees?

I think where I have started breaking down was this summer. I put a lot of pressure on myself to keep cranking out daily posts. The combination of what was happening in my life as well as my fatigue for reading the same book for nine months. I started to realize that I was doing this to myself. As a result, I wanted to make some tweaks, which I did. I dropped the hard daily requirement.

I have talked about needing a vacation, and I took that a couple of weeks ago. This was right around the time that I was enacting my reduced expectations. As a short amount of time has elapsed, my enthusiasm is continuing to wain. Part of it is that I have painted myself into a corner. Now that I have read half of it, I want to be done with the Art of War. I am doing stuff, but it is more of the same. There is only so many times I can write about another way of making Grape Juice.

What is really holding me back is my extremely stiff counter culture streak. I have written over 1000 articles, most of which nobody has read. Why is that, I hate social media. I have realized that I am never going to market my work in a way that I will be successful. Take that to the extreme, if I am not going to be successful, then why am I doing this in the first place? That sounds like insanity.

It is not all negative. I am proud of what I have done. Unfortunately, that doesn’t pay the bills or become a career. I find it useful too. I search my site to jog my memory on things that I have done over the years. Sometimes I am looking for a certain recipe or thing I did and this helps a lot in keeping track of those things.

As a reminder, I started writing as a way to build discipline for podcasting. As a working person, I simply do not have time to do a daily podcast. It typically takes three days for me to get each podcast done. I could do a lot better with time if I didn’t spend so much time writing my outline. That is pretty risky (for me) though. The more prepared I am, the better I deliver. I really do not need a website to continue to podcast. It will still go out on Apple and Spotify and be available at Castbox.

Spoiler alert: I did renew for another year. I will be honest though, I am starting to fade from futility. I don’t mind doing all of this for myself, but I don’t see the point of paying for it too. Maybe I just need to shop the price, if it was more reasonable then I wouldn’t feel like a big waste.

In year’s past, it was a no brainer that I was going to keep going. I think that I am going to set a line in the sand this year. I will probably make the decision by mid- September next year. I definitely want to take what I have done if if the site goes down and that will require some time to prepare. I say all of this because I don’t want to disappear someday without knowing what is going on.

My criteria is yet to be determined. Certainly, if I could find a way that doesn’t violate my being to make some money would be a good start. I don’t need to replace my income to keep this viable. If I had the ability to offset expenses with income, like buying tools and giving reviews as an example, then it would definitely be worth the effort. More on this as the year goes on.

End Your Programming Routine: Don’t just keep doing things for no reason, this would be programming. My reason has been because I like doing it, I still do. But, do I like spending most of my free time doing it? Not as much this year as year’s past. For another year, I will finish out The Art of War and keep working to put up content as time and desire permits.

August 26, 2024 – Reboot

August 26, 2024 /

I am back after taking a couple weeks off. Following my last podcast, I decided to spend my time off evaluating changes that I want to make. Tune in today to find out what those changes are. Hopefully, you will find this a better overall experience.

February 21, 2023 – A Stranger in a Strange Land

February 21, 2023 /

It is kind of cheating, but things are not quite right. Due to an unfortunate issue, I missed my flight out of Indianapolis. Consequently, I ended up not getting home until early Sunday morning. That didn’t really help me get re-adjusted and instead of having the majority of Saturday, go to bed early and then Sunday, I was dragging all day Sunday only to get back to work on Monday. All that being said, my creative battery is really low.

A couple of things happened on my trip. The first was that SSL certificate expired last week. Technically, it didn’t expire until mid-April but this happens every couple of months. In fact, it is not suppose to expire but once a year. I don’t understand this at all. I know how to work around it, but that was not something I was really equipped to deal with on the road. It was just too many technical things to handle on an iPad. The second, I was checking on the health of other things due to my SSL problems today and it seems like I am running into some caching issues. What seems to be the problem is that the amount of data is building up and causing slowness of the server painting data, particularly pictures.

There is a actually a third problem as well. This problem is that it seems like MySQL version is out of date. The last two problems seem to be related to me sharing a server with other users. To solve that, it seems logical that the next obvious step is to pay for more space or my own server. That is easier said than done.

It’s not that I can’t get a dedicated server. The question is really should I? This whole thing was an experiment to see if I could build lifestyle/content business. Given that I have made $0 on this, it seems very impractical for me to pay more money just to serve up free content. I guess what I am saying is that as long as things continue at a moderate price, I am more than willing to keep going. There does become a point of diminishing returns.

The first year is always cheap, this is how they get you. The next year the cost is three times as much and then it seems to go up 20% a year from there. I guess that I am seeing that I am not really seeing the return on my investment. Now, I have to own the business plan. That being said, my idea was always to grow a reader base before actually trying to figure out a revenue model. I am not really seeing much growth in my site downloads in three years.

Ultimately, I am saying that I don’t think that there is a lot of desire for my work. And therefore I am in the dichotomy of upgrade to survive or die a slow death. To be clear, I am not saying that I am quitting, but what I am saying that I need to evaluate the future. When I talked about the ‘white hatters’ two weeks ago, I need to put some effort to really measure engagement and how much more effort that I should put into this endeavor.

Last week, I was listening to a podcast overnight and it was about two brothers who literally have built a side business on a Youtube channel about cutting firewood. It was their opinion (as well as many others) that content generation should be confined to a niche subject. The more niche the better. I just don’t want to do that, and I suppose this is my downfall. I guess we will see, I was hoping three years ago that there would be more people like me, interested in lots of different things.

End Your Programming Routine: I don’t think that there is any programming here today. I guess what I am saying is that I am probably not going to do this forever without some sort of return. I’m not even saying that it has to be financial. I cant really complain about not making any money when I haven’t provided any vehicle to do so. I don’t really want to beg. I don’t really want to get hooked into some third party program like Patreon. My first measure was really engagement, which I don’t see much of.