Wayne Woodworth

Are you reluctant to subscribe to something online because you don’t want to give up your email address and/or phone number? Sometimes you find something online that looks interesting, like a free e-book or documentary. But it requires you to enter your email address into an opt-in form. You already receive enough spam and don’t want any more. So what do you do? Do you miss out or do you give up your contact info?

You have a third option. You don’t have to use your primary email address or phone number. An alternate will work just as well as long as you have access to it. Here Google is your friend. You can create a new Google account, even if you already have one.

Have you ever thought about where your family comes from? I grew up in New York State, so I learned about U.S. history, New York history, and then world history in school. But where was my family through all of that? You know, it’s too bad that we don’t develop much of a sense of the greater world around us until we get older because I had access to three of my great grandfathers when I was young. I would love to hear their stories now.

I looked into my ancestry once before, roughly 20 years ago. My father-in-law was researching his family tree and he must have introduced me to Ancestry.com, so I gave mine a shot. I learned a bit, and it was interesting, but I quickly came to dead ends and moved on. I found out that one of my Mom’s relatives had also researched their family tree.

If you’ve been reading along, you know how I recently updated WordPress and found that a custom plugin I wrote several years ago is now grossly out of date.

It’s broken.

When I tried to update the software I needed to revise my plugin I found that my computer, a Mac, is also grossly out of date. I shared all of the trials and tribulations I went through to get a stable development environment last time.

Here I’m going to share the same in regards to updating my custom WordPress plugin.

I shared in my previous post how I updated WordPress recently and it broke the custom plugin that I wrote several years ago. Then through updating my development setup I found that my Mac is much more out of date than I thought. I don’t want to get a new Mac because they don’t make one comparable to the one I have, so I tried a new laptop with Windows 11. But it keeps crashing. Which leaves Linux.

I like Linux. It’s open source and free to use. I tried it out once many years ago and really enjoyed it because it took me back to my college days working on Unix systems. It’s a good operating system for regular office-type stuff and surfing the Internet and it’s great for software development, especially for the web. And that’s what I need right now.

Linux runs very well on old hardware, but I’m installing it on a new HP Omen Windows 11 laptop. I’m not getting rid of Windows though. I want to make this laptop dual boot so that when I start up I can choose either Windows 11 or Linux. People do it all the time so it should be easy. Operative word being “should.”

Have you ever noticed that when you decide to make big changes in your life that everything seems to fall apart? Well, this blog post is about just one area that has fallen apart. It happens that it directly affects my existing business.

Yeah, welcome to the chaos. That about covers it.

Hi, I’m Wayne. I’ve been working for myself online for several years and I decided in the last few months to revamp my online business. At first I thought I was just going to continue what I’ve been doing, just do it a lot better to generate a lot more income. It turns out that I’m going a lot bigger, and what I’m currently doing will just be a small contributing part to that.

Here’s the background. I have an online affiliate product business that I run through another website – GetMyWellness.com. The website is critical because it is how I get traffic to the products so that I make money. I use WordPress for the site because it is an easy way to create and publish content. But I used to work as a software developer, so I had to create a custom plugin to help build my pages. I wrote it several years ago just after WordPress released it’s Gutenberg block-style editor. If you work with WordPress then you are probably familiar with their block concept.