With all the conferences happening over the past couple of months, it has really got me thinking about the lack of socializing I have had since moving down to Atlanta. I wouldn't necessarily say it’s a fear of missing out (FOMO), but more a lack of social interaction, or engagement to make the acronym better, LOSE.

For 2025, I am trying to create some more margins in my life to allow for more room to both socialize more and create more time to share the personal stuff I am working on. The goal is to do that by offsetting client work with income from personal projects. And, I guess we’ll see how that goes!

You can watch Laracon US LIVE on YouTube!

Some conferences I plan on attending next year:

• MicroConf
• RenderATL
• Laracon EU / Laracon US

It would also be cool to checkout some more niche conferences like:

• Local First Conf

I am also hoping that rebooting Jam Sessions, and having some conversations on the Jam Sessions podcast on Ripple.FM will help fill in the gaps between conferences.

And, if anyone is a current Switchyards member let me know! It would be great to hang out. I will probably be dropping into either the Roswell or Chamblee locations, but it would be great to get around to all of them to check out the vibes.

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner, and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplayfm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics

I did it! I was able to fix LinkCards and stabilize the service. And, to my surprise, it actually looked like some of the traffic was actually legitimate open graph images being generated. Once I was able to stabilize the servers, and finally access the dashboard I noticed that my site pkgstats.com has almost 2 million images generated for it, so I guess that’s what was causing all the issues. One of my sites was taking down the other, kind of, go figure!

As I was thinking about how nice the service is—when it is working—it started to make me realize that I should probably try to clean things up a bit, optimize a few things, and maybe slap a price tag on it and see if others would like to use it as well. Except, if I am going to go through all the trouble of re-writing and turning this into a real product the one thing that has always bothered be about it was the name, LinkCards.

For one, the .com for LinkCards is currently some kind of malware phishing site, so not a good thing. That, and the name is kind of limiting. So, after a bit of searching for a better name on the registrars I ended up coming across, OpenGraphs. At first I saw the .io, .org, .net, .app domains were all available, which already had me thinking this is a much better name for the service. Then, I realized the holiest of holies was potentially within my hands reach, opengraphs.com. It was available as a BIN (buy it now) on Namecheap. It was a little expensive, but at the same time was probably the cheapest it will ever be. And that got my mind wandering...

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner, and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplayfm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics

I just wanted to give a quick update on a new, private podcast that I am starting on ripple.fm. The show is called Jam Session: Private Edition, and it’s going to be a place to put some recorded discussions that are possibly too private for your traditional public podcast that gets blasted out to all the podcast places.

The idea for the show is a bit of a continuation of Jam Sessions, a meetup/mastermind group I used to host when I was back in New York. Jam Sessions was a private and intimate space where people could share what they are working on, or questions they are struggling to answer, and then get feedback or insights from the other members in the group. My hope is that this podcast will provide the same safe, intimate space to have these conversations so we can all learn and grow together.

So, with that said, I hope the show sounds interesting. Please, sign up, subscribe, drop me a line, and hopefully we can talk on the show soon.

To follow along, you can find me at ryanhefner.com, follow me on Twitter @ryanhefner, and keep up with the show on allplay.fm and @allplayfm.

Help yourself, while supporting the show, by trying some of the services that I use, and highly recommend:
Transistor FM
Fathom Analytics