Yesterday, I made the tough decision to get rid of my data.usmanity.com server, it’s been sitting idly for over 6 months and I haven’t really done much with it. I had been waiting for some time to rewrite some of the app code to handle sending different forms of data over and I just didn’t take the time to do so.

I also had data on there that was becoming stale if not useless for me since I didn’t have access to the mysql DB anymore.

Going forward, I’m planning on a different way to handle storing data and maybe something that’s more versatile.

In a conversation with a friend recently, he told me how his strategy is to not worry about creating complicated flows for personal projects, this wasn’t something I had thought about before and that’s why data has always been a neglected project because the deployment process has led me to stop using it.

I now have a favorite 80s song that I can listen to on repeat!

I wanted to write about this for awhile but I can find a good starting point so today I just sat down and decided to type out what my thoughts are about this topic.

What are dividends? 
In this post, I’m referring to the stock market’s term “dividends” which means an amount paid out to investors who hold shares of a company. Mostly larger companies do this when they’re big enough that their investors have been holding their stock for a long time and this might be a way to keep investors interested in holding it even longer plus it’s a way for investors to gain some money without selling shares.

What am I doing with dividends?
The past few years, I’ve been using 2 main ways of investing my money (outside of a 401k). First, I use Betterment, this holds most of my money since I don’t want to be playing with most of my long term savings. Second, I use Robinhood which holds what I call “experimental” money. I call it experimental instead of play or fun money because even though it’s all dependent on me how I invest this money, it’s still real money! I still want to make sane decisions and hold stock of companies that are valuable.
Robinhood makes it extremely easy to buy and sell stock and best of all, it’s always free! This means buying 1 share or 100 shares doesn’t cost a penny, traditional brokerages charge an insane amount no matter the number of shares being traded.

Dividend as income
Having no minimums or fees on trading, Robinhood makes it very easy to start buying shares of many companies and essentially allowing you to build an extremely well diversified portfolio. 
I started using Robinhood at the end of 2014, so about 3.5 years now. In the beginning, I was just buying a few shares of each company I just was interested in or had some familiarity with and this quickly turned out to be a mediocre strategy. If you ask most people “what is your goal with investing?” I’m sure most will say “make money.” And that’s really why it’s easy to say “well, that should be the strategy, to make money” but I think it’s more complicated than that. 
Seeing your shares rise in value is easy in a booming economy like the past few years but I believe this will start to slow down or some sort of a bubble bursting will happen soon. 
So to think about how to make an income using dividends, I started looking at companies that either pay dividends consistently or pay a high amount of their earnings as dividends. The latter are usually companies that are REITs (short for Real Estate Investment Trust, learn more). REITs pay high dividends and are usually pretty cheap to buy, but the problem is, the share price doesn’t see tech company gains and it’s dependent on the economy since infrastructure and real estate are pretty dependent on how the economy is doing. 
Examples of companies that pay well in dividends and are just household names are AT&T, Colgate-Palmolive, Coca-cola, and many more. These are called Dividend Aristocrats, they’re well-known and large companies that usually align very well with the economy. 

Current status
Right now, I’m able to get about $40 in dividends every month (not an average). The goal is to slowly move this number higher and higher and I’m not sure what the best way to go about this right now as I’m buying a mix of high growth companies as well as REITs which pay a high dividend. 
I’ll post more about this in the coming weeks, please let me know if you’d like to know more about any of this. 

Yesterday, I turned 28. This is the perfect time to reflect on the first half of 2018 and also my past year since I turned 27. When 2018 started, I decided not to start with any resolutions as they most often don’t get fulfilled. I wanted to mostly observe myself and get to know myself better. I guess that has been one of the main things for me this year in my personal life.

I’m happy to report that audiobooks have been a steady obsession over the past 6 months continuing from 2017 as well. This helps me learn about a topic or listen to a fictional story while doing things like commuting on the bus, mundane tasks around the house, and often times relax before going to bed. 

I haven’t been writing as much as I’d like to, one thing I notice is that writing down things like notes, thoughts, opinions, and blog posts like this helps me recenter toward something I much prefer. A stabilizer of some sort.

This post isn’t as exciting as I’d like it to be but this is so far my 2018. 

Also, I got married in April ❤️.

Below is a screenshot of the most recent changes I’ve made to free press to get a single post showing. It’s missing author, date, and other important links but I’m working on that next.

I’ve spent maybe 15-20 minutes just trying to get the line-height correct, but…it’s a tricky problem because I’m sure by now my eyes can’t discern what’s good and bad after looking at this screen. 

Over 2 months ago, I wrote about starting work on my own theme. This has been slow going but I have actually learned quite a bit even for being a thing put on the back-burner for awhile. 

First, local WordPress development is easily doable on OSX using MAMP. After installing MAMP, you’ll need to point your “Web server” to a clone of the wordpress download (found here).

Once you have the document root set to the proper place, click “OK” and then “Start Servers” on the main MAMP window.

This will open a start page with some info about the local MAMP instance running. Click on “My Website” on the top nav, you’ll be taken to a screen that’ll start the WordPress setup.

After all this is done, you’ll have a local version of WordPress running. Now, to start developing a theme, you’ll need to create a theme inside the wordpress folder on your computer inside the wp-content/themes folder. Themes should not include numbers in the name (according to WordPress docs).

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I’ve been very slowly working on the free press theme and today I was working on it and I decided that I should keep a log so I’m not making small posts about all the things I’m learning or running into while developing it.

You can see it updated in real time here: Free Press development log

Below are some cool console.log tricks that I recently have been learning about.

Add CSS using %c

Change Styles: use the %c formatter to style everything that follows.

console.log('%c Hello World', 'color: blue;');
console.log('%c Hello %c World', 'color: blue;', 'font-weight: bold; color: red;');

Each %c acts as a delimiter which means everything following will take the styles added to the next param passed to console.log.

Clear the console

This one just happened for me one day since I use it so often in iTerm2, clearing the console makes it easier to read and digest the console log. To do this just press: Command + K on Mac and Control + K on Windows. Btw, this is the same shortcut for iTerm2.

You can also add it to your code and it’ll work by just adding in clear(). This will help debugging code a bit easier as you’ll only see what your code should be showing. 

Display objects or arrays

If you have an object like below:

user = {
id: 123,
twitter: '@usmanity',
location: 'california'
}

You can print this in an easy to ready format by using console.table() like console.table(user) and it’ll display like this:

Same goes for arrays.

I’ll try to share more tips if I come across more! 😀

I love people who are helpful and caring. I think it does require effort to be nice and I think it’s important to recognize people who are nice!

Thank you to everyone who is nice!