Giving into the flow. I feel like I have been getting frustrated with myself for not fully focusing on a single project. After all, that's the only way to build a successful product. Right? RIGHT???

So, I have succumb to my fleeting thoughts and ideas to go where the water is taking me and not wasting time, nor energy, trying to fight the temptation or push out the motivation because I think I should be working on something, when my brain is clearly telling me different.

With that said, I have been working on the new opengraphs.com app that will be replacing LinkCards, and so far so good. I am about to the point of having a completely rewritten app using all new frameworks and underlying schema that will do everything that LinkCards had previously done, but also support some ideas that I have had for it for a while now, so it’s kind of nice to come in clean and green field this thing with fresh cold and incubated ideas.

I am pushing to have the first version of the app deployed to the production instances this week, and hopefully have one of my sites using the new endpoints for image generation. There’s definitely still a lot of work before I will let people in and start charging cards, but I really want to get to a point where I can start to stress test this new setup to make sure it’s going to perform the way I think it will. 🤞

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.

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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
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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:
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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:
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Trying to keep the spirits high in this otherwise kind of low week, littered with some Summer sickness and a lot of client work. As much as I had hoped to work some more on Transmits, I ended up getting wrapped up in a lot of client work, along with some maintenance work to clean up some spillage from last weeks publishing of the Transmits Podcast.

With that said, here’s what I was able to get done/am working on:

• Fixed an issue on allplay.fm where Transmits episodes were showing up on the site*. I ended up updating the site to consume the RSS feed, instead of the Transistor API, since I was running into rate limiting issues. Now the site builds faster, and I am not getting the episode flow-over.
• I am currently working on mitigating some issues affecting LinkCards, to see if I can get the service back up and running, since an application denial attack has pretty much rendered it useless. Assuming this work, expect some shiny new `og:image`’s across all my projects popping out soon! (And, hopefully get images rendering again for pkgstats.com)

Assuming things are looking good on those fronts, I have some immediate quick updates I am planning to work on for Transmits over the weekend, and some updates coming to that podcast (and this!) soon.

Take care!

*It turns out I was passing the show id, except I was sending it camel cased (`showId`), instead of snake cased (`show_id`). Whoops!

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:
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As I have been working on building Transmits, I started reading Rob Walling’s (@robwalling) book, Start Small, Stay Small. I was originally reading his latest book, The SaaS Playbook, but like he suggests in there, if your business is not at a certain monthly recurring revenue (MRR) you might be better off going back and reading his first book, so I did.

While reading it I realized I was breaking the cardinal sin numero uno, no marketing, nor testing the market to see if people would actually pay for what I am building. Granted, this is definitely a scratch my own itch project, and I know I will be using it regardless if I am able to get others to pay for it. But, at the same time, I am definitely investing a good amount of time trying to make what I am building really nice, both for myself and to wow some potential future users into being paying customers.

Thinking about what I could do to start building some initial marketing efforts I realized that the quickest thing I could do was repurpose the Transmits-specific episodes from this podcast, and re-package them into a Transmits-only podcast that I could start publishing, and include on the transmits.io site.

Reasons why making a Transmits-only podcast makes sense, now and into the future:

• SEO: By publishing the episodes and including those within a /podcast area of the marketing site, I am hoping that both the show notes and podcast transcriptions will feed the Google/search engine machines and start to get Transmits ranking for a few key terms
• Backlinks + SEO: Since I will be publishing the podcast, I hoping that the feeds and episodes will help to build up a good amount of backlinks to the site, driving more traffic and helping boost key word rankings
• Connection: There’s really no better way to understand what someone is trying to do than to listen to them. I am an avid podcast listener and am definitely more motivated to support people that I am listening to, than those who I have no direct connection with (even though that connection is mostly a one-way from my podcast app to my ears, but it still a remarkably personal one, even being one-way).
• Build Listeners + Subscribers: From the start of thinking about Transmits, I have always envisioned the product having a podcast where I would bring people on to discuss tools for thought, or podcasting, or whatever else might be interesting to discuss that could be tied back to either the underlying tech or goal for the platform, so why not start to get that wheel spinning and try to pick-up a few early subscribers along the way.
• Flywheels: Since I am already podcasting about Transmits, why not repurpose that content and effort and apply it to kickstart and support future efforts
• And, finally, it just sounded fun and was a good excuse to tinker on some site stuff!

With all that said, and without further ado, I am happy to say that the Transmits: The Podcast is live! Check it out, subscribe, and all that jazz. I have re-packaged some previous episodes from this podcast, and will probably do the same with this episode. And, from this point forward, I am going to have to come up with a nice way to introduce the episode without necessarily having to record a custom intro per pod, or maybe I’ll just drop the intros and get right to the meat, to keep it easy.

If you want to get early access to start playing around, please join the mailing list here: https://www.transmits.io

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:
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After recording the last episode via Transmits, I mentioned that I needed to test recording on playback on mobile, specifically Mobile Safari (since I am an iPhone user), and Chrome on Android. My goal for Transmits is that I can launch the initial version as a progressive web app (PWA), so it’s crucial for it to work when added to the home screen on either iOS or Android devices.

Well, in classic fashion, once I went to test the app on mobile devices, it totally failed in Mobile Safari, and regular Safari for that matter. It turns out that Safari only supports saving files via the FileSystemSyncAccessHandle, which only works within the context of a Web Worker. So, I rolled up my sleeves and started refactoring the app to include a web worker–surprisingly the first one I have written!–and wire up the file saving to use it. Low and behold, this week’s episode was recorded on my iPhone, via Transmits running as a PWA!

Next up, I am working on a spike to get speech to text working for transcription running locally via a Web Assembly (WASM) wrapped version of OpenAI’s Whisper model. Once that is working, then will come defining the data models and start working on building out the cloud sync support. Not gonna lie, I am getting pretty stoked on this app so far, and I hope you will too!

If you want to get early access to start playing around, please join the mailing list here: https://www.transmits.io

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