# If it wasn't for family related things I would have closed my Facebook account years ago. But, as it stands, there are sometimes posts I need to see and react to.
That is the only use Facebook ever gets from me so they really have no data to present me with a meaningfully personalised service.
It can be quite amusing seeing the suggestions offered up as people I might know. If I accepted even half I think I'd be connected to almost the entire population of the Philippines by now.
Twitter, however, is different and I'm not entirely sure why. Although I've not actively tweeted in over 6 months, and am undecided if I ever will again, I'm strangely attached to my Twitter account.
Maybe it's because I joined back in 2006, the year it was launched, and am proud to have an account that old. Maybe it's because I know what Twitter could be and I'm just holding back until something changes.
Or maybe it's because there's a fundamental difference in the way I see and personally connect with the two services.
Many complain that Twitter doesn't know them, even after years of posting thousands of tweets. However, compared to the mountains of information held about us by Facebook I think this is quite refreshing.
It also illustrates the different purposes of the networks.
Although we can tailor our Twitter feed by following/unfollowing people its purpose is, ultimately, to show us "what's happening." This may occur partly in line with the parameters we set but it is a more specific goal within a much wider context.
And, to me at least, that is a far more attractive proposition than the blatant 'entrapment' within the network employed by Facebook.
Liked: Micro-blogging - Phil Stephens...
It's interesting to see the different approaches people take to scratch their (micro)blogging itches.# I've often thought about daily journalling but never really had the drive to do it. Seeing that Day One is Apple's free app of the week made me consider it once again.
I think part of the problem is never really knowing what to write. I just can't get the visions of teenage angst induced scrawl out of my head ?
Listening to an episode of the Fundamentally Broken podcast recently I noted with interest the discussion between Seth Clifford and Tim Nahumck about journalling in which they said it could be as much or as little as you wanted but there was no point it being too little if you wanted to return to it and make sense of what you wrote.
That's somewhat reassuring but, after the Write365 project effectively turned into an extended, public, self-therapy session, I don't want to risk heading down the same route.
I also find that writing in multiple places reduces the focus I have on each, even if they are for completely different purposes, and don't want to impact the new approach to the blog.
Maybe I'll give it a go and see what happens. Or, maybe I won't ?
Comments
# Liked: I Don't Want to Do This Anymore | Fundamentally Broken...
This! So much this!
(Contains explicit language)
Colin Walker says:
# Last night I had the idea that I could show post revisions for the garden pages on the front end (yes, this is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night) so as to keep track of changes. Definitely one of those "because I can" things. Using the function
wp_get_post_revisions()I can pull them out and use a little logic to get the previous version (the last one that doesn't match the current saved content.) WordPress then has a built in text comparison functionwp_text_diffwhich displays the changes in the nice table you see in wp_admin when checking revisions:I'll probably just add a toggle to show/hide the table. I don't know whether this is something I'll ever use or need, maybe if I accidentally save something incorrectly. # Something I've thought about a lot over the years, but never been able to commit to, is journalling. I've tried paper and digital, app and web, morning pages and daily gratitude logs, but nothing has stuck for an extended period. I don't know why. A couple of years back I went to the trouble of creating a private journalling plugin for WordPress (well, it only created a custom post type) but removed it, unused. I don't even blog daily. A couple of recent posts got me reconsidering. In "A place to write" Seth Godin stated:
CJ Chilvers mentioned that his sole constraint for journalling was to "write something, anything, every day" - my exact words about the #Write365 project. In the past I have felt that "writing in multiple places reduces the focus I have on each" even if those places were reserved for completely different purposes. Recently, however, I've been negotiating the blog and the garden reasonably well so, armed with the insights from Seth and CJ, I have decided to give journalling another go. I have gone back to my plugin but, this time, added a simple interface for posting journal entries based on the existing front end forms I've been using on the blog. Maybe it never stuck because I didn't have all the pieces in place. Now they are and it can't get much simpler. Here's hoping that will carry me through. # "We cannot look down upon [them] if our obvious is their oblivious." Quite a profound quote from 6 years ago me. # This morning's foray into post revisions was a typical example of how I work: I think of something, have no idea of whether it is possible, then set out to make it happen. I had no idea about
wp_get_post_revisionsorwp_text_diffbut found them while doing some judicious searching. I scramble around, learning as I go, documenting the journey as a way to remember it. But, I suppose most people are like that, our ideas are exciting because they are new, unknown quantities, and the sense of achievement is all the greater.