I’m doing a little housekeeping in my blog world this week. One of the things I was trying to straighten out turned into a monumental mess last week, for which I apologize.

I’m trying my hand at a capability called “IFTTT.” Which stands for “If This, Then That”…it’s a website where you can connect social media, blogging, mobile apps, and even smart home apparati together and you can have things work together pretty seamlessly. I like the idea of it, but I’m still learning here.

Last week I had told it to turn Facebook fan page posts into blog posts automatically. I was testing the capability for Dave, who was interested in bringing his own model railroading blog back to life: he shares most of his updates on Facebook, and to have those photos and updates automatically go to his blog would serve as a nice archive.

Unfortunately, I had a script set up to turn blog posts into Facebook fan pages. So guess what happened?

Yeah, it was bad. I estimate about 320 blog and social media posts appeared over the course of an hour in an endless loop, making a mess out of peoples’ Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, and even Tumblr accounts.

It took most of the afternoon to fix it, and I shall now never speak of it again.

But now I do have a successful Facebook-to-blog and Instagram-to-blog “IFTTT.” The last 3-4 posts have been done that way.

This evening I was writing up an email offering some blog advice to a friend. While I was telling her about some of the capabilities I’ve used for blogging, I decided to go check up on some of my plugins and widgets.

What a disaster. Numerous widgets and plugins had updates and some of the updates had disabled some of things you should be seeing in the blog, from commenting to ads to an archive for searching old posts. I’m in the middle of fixing that stuff right now.

Lately, on the tech front, the family has been trying out some smart home devices. We recently got an Amazon Echo, to which we have attached some lightbulbs, one of our weather webcams, and a power outlet. Since we had our Echo in time for Amazon’s Prime Day, we got some great deals on the lightbulbs and the power outlet. Half price! We are still getting to know what it can and can’t to, and it’s been fun learning about it. I’m hoping we can soon get a WiFi-enabled deadbolt lock for the front door. I think it’ll be great for the boys.

Stay tuned and I will talk about some of the things we’re doing to make our home a “smart home.”