My quest continues in 2024 to find better social media platforms! While Mastodon is currently my favorite social media platform for engagement, it's unfortunately not the platform many of those that I followed or followed me on Twitter. Many of these friends and acquaintances have either migrated to Bluesky, Threads, or stayed on Twitter/X. I've been busy looking at these other alternatives.

Last week the CEO and a founder of Post News, Noam Bardin, announced that Post News will be shutting down this May. Post News is one of the alternative social media platform that has launched in recent years as an alternative to more established websites like X and Facebook. Post News distinguished itself from other social media platforms by its efforts to provide users access to premium content and news articles without fully subscribing to news organizations.

A couple weeks ago, my wife and I visited our son in Grand Forks, ND so we could see him in the musical, Ride the Cyclone. The musical was presented by the Empty State Theatre. He played the role of Ricky Potts, a boy that before his death was mute because of a trauma, though in the afterlife his ability to speak has been restored. Confused? Well you'll just have to see the play if you ever get a chance.

Logan was awesome in this musical! He was so good on stage that all I saw was his character. I was no longer Dad but an audience member enjoying the show. The rest of the cast awas also just as good.

I haven't been writing too much lately as I've been busy on a number of personal projects. One of those projects has been redoing my office at home. My previous office space was put together haphazardly a few years ago as a response to the pandemic and finding I needed my own space for both work and play. Fast forward a few years and I now find I want the office space to be better designed, more functional, and include better furniture.

My new standing desk is requiring a new location for my cup of coffee. I will adapt...

Lately, I've been thinking about what it takes to really be happy. So in the new year, I've had some random thoughts on the subject of happiness. This one is more appropriate for social media than a blog post, but here it is anyway.

Being rich or poor is all relative. There is always someone richer and always someone poorer than you. If one can't be grateful with what they already have in this moment of time, I don't think one can ever find happiness no matter what "wealth" is obtained in the future.

Last year at this time, I quietly introduced a new website called INFOTECH Pub. It was an effort to see if there was enough interest in a website focused on information technology much in the same way I've seen interest in socPub and CMS Report. Well, the short answer is no.

The site's failure to pull in new traffic was due in part because I didn't have enough original content for the site to distinguish it from my other websites. In truth though, after spending more almost 25 years in an information technology career, my heart was never really that interested in spending my off hours supporting a business IT related website as a hobby. With these two obstacles in the way of any success for the website, I've decided to close down INFOTECH PUB and redirect any traffic back to socPub and CMS Report.

One of the neat things about Bluesky is that you have the ability to use an Internet domain as your handle on Bluesky. So for instance, instead of having @bryanruby.bsky.social as my handle, I now have @bryanruby.com as my handle. In the world of decentralization, this allows you to have the same username no matter what application/platform/server you're on. This is one of the advantages of the AT Protocol which Bluesky is built on.

I plan on writing more about why this feature matters and how it is done at a later date.