I haven't had much to talk about lately, as I haven't made a post in almost a week. So I thought I would start typing and see where this goes. I've been lazy lately, so I don't have much hope for this post. But buckle up anyway because here comes the shit show.
We are having some equipment installed at work, so I only worked two days this week. This would have been a great time to hammer away at the website, but it's in a reasonably stable state, and the only thing left to do is a small list of features I would like to add and a few bugs that need fixing—also some code cleanup and back-end things... the boring stuff. And I just haven't been in the mood to get started.
I have been playing around with the styles on the site's front and back end. I added a dropdown menu for the blog a few minutes ago if you are on a computer.
It can get confusing when working with the site's layout as I also have the dark theme, so I have four different websites to deal with, large screens with light and dark modes and small screens with light and dark modes. All four have their own stylesheets. So I miss quite a few edits along the way. There are probably a million minor bugs to work out that I haven't encountered yet.
Yesterday, Tyson's announced they were shutting down four plants in Arkansas and Missouri. This hit me hard because I know quite a few good people that work at the Dexter plant. I'm from that area, and it sucks to see yet another large employer leave. That's one of the reasons I left the area.
My youngest child is an adult but is autistic and still lives with his mom and her boyfriend. They both work at that plant as well.
I knew there would be consequences when Trump quickly pumped so much money into the economy. Biden continued the trend during his first year. This is the result. Nearly everyone plays politics like a team sport, so it's easy to point fingers at the other party. But they both caused this.
Raising interest rates by the Fed is a necessary evil that we will have to endure for the next several years to cool off this crazy economy.
To my Republican friends, I hope you will see the big picture and realize that giving money to the lower class helps the economy. This is the proof. But too much is a bad thing.
To my Democratic friends, again, this is what happens when the government gives too much at once.
If you give money to the rich, they invest in themselves. If you give money to the poor, they invest in the economy because they have no choice. Study after study has shown that trickle-down economics doesn't work. But I digress.
It has finally cooled down here from the triple digits we have seen over the last few weeks. Yet, I haven't been in the mood to get out and exercise. I've just been feeling so sluggish. I feel so useless sitting down and watching television, but that's what I have been doing this past week. What's worse, I'm not even into a specific show. I can't find anything good to watch. A road trip may be what I need to get out of my funk.
I got so bored today that I went to check on my Facebook pages, and damn, they are vacant. I schedule posts to my profiles weeks in advance, so I rarely visit the sites. But as I was scrolling around, I checked out my feed. I don't follow many people through my website profiles, so Facebook shows mostly recommended pages on my feed. They won't recommend my pages to anyone because of past violations, but this is one of the posts it recommended to me.
This pisses me off because my pages are "at risk of being deleted" for posting jokes. One image that got me in trouble was a meme of a fully dressed woman with large breasts, captioned, "I love you for your personalitits." Facebook won't recommend my page for at least four more months. They pushed all of my pages, including my personal profile, down on everyones feeds for one whole year for posting things that went against their policies. Apparently, I don't understand the algorithm. That's why I haven't been posting much to the FartDump page.
If I can make it to the one-year mark and they take the soft ban off the page, I may post more over there. I've also struggled to gain any traction on other social media sites. The only way to get anywhere is to either post nearly nude photos or pay to have your posts seen. If you are a cute female, you can make lots of money on social media with little to no effort. But try to gain an audience any other way, and it will cost you.
The other thing that irked me this week is Google is mandating that everyone using Google Adsense start using GDPR notices to show ads on our sites. If you don't know what those are, it's the annoying popup at the bottom of websites asking you to accept their cookies. I don't advertise on FartDump but show a few ads on my other sites on certain pages. But I have been adamant about not wanting pop-ups on my sites. So I won't show any ads after the first of the year, mostly because I don't even make enough money off of the ads to constitute pissing people off with that annoying popup that most sites put at the bottom of their website when you first visit. It's annoying, and I don't see the point.
I understand the sentiment. People don't want their personal information harvested and sold to third parties. If a website participates in these shady practices, they SHOULD have to notify you that they do such things. But for small sites like mine, I add small cookies to your browser to store your session, making the pages load faster. There is no personal information exchanged between your device and my website. These things are covered in the privacy policy; I don't see a point in bugging people with annoying popup confirmations otherwise.
I run these websites for enjoyment. Also, I don't have to worry about what I post here for fear of violating some weird policies. Cursing or showing mild nudity is about as far as I go, so I don't have anything to worry about legally. This is my hobby. Would it be nice to make some money as a side hustle? Absolutely, but not at the expense of annoying you, the reader. All two of you, you are the real heroes.
I have some Amazon affiliate links on the other sites, which I will leave until they push for the same practice. Once they do, I will have tons of editing to do because they are all hardcoded into the files. I may eliminate them whenever I get around to migrating Wisedocks to my software. As for Stellar History, that website doesn't have many articles, so it won't take too long to fix.
