# I couldn't sleep so spent a few hours during the night locking down my Facebook account and cleaning all sorts from the timeline
I used to have auto-cross posting enabled from Twitter back when that was a thing so all those old tweets were still sat on Facebook.
Not any more. I cleared them out along with all the other cruft like which books and films I'd read and watched.
I was hoping the repetitive monotony of manually deleting status updates might cause me to drift off like a digital version of counting sheep.
It didn't.
I removed everything I could to do with Facebook ads and tracking as well as stopping any apps from using Platform so that I can't use Facebook to log in to anything.
It's about as close as I can get to deactivating my account without actually doing it.
Comments
# I've long toyed with the idea of writing a newsletter, I even announced that one was "coming soon" back in 2011 but it fell through.
The idea still appeals to me but I have the same problem now that I did then: what to make it about?
As so much of what I write appears on the blog I find it hard to come up with compelling content that goes beyond the norm, that people would be willing to sign up for and have me invade their inboxes.
It's the whole small ideas vs big ideas problem.
I've signed up to a few newsletters from other folks recently and I think this, combined with the void left by not being able to record the microcast, has piqued my interest once again.
Maybe I could expand on a blog post and spin it off in new directions. Perhaps I could highlight the connections between certain posts, especially some older ones which with readers are not familiar. Or maybe I could revisit ideas and give them a new airing to see how my perspective has changed.
It could, of course, be something completely different and not connected to the blog at all.
I'm not after just pushing out a "me too" email, people get enough of those, so would want it to have some real value, purpose and sustainability.
I'm open to thoughts and ideas.
@colinwalker sorry you couldn’t sleep but sounds like a good use of the time. I am planning on going through and doing some manual imports of some of the old Facebook posts to my website when I get the time with the goal of only leaving the posts from the current year on Facebook
@EddieHinkle Yeah, it was pretty productive. I just wanted to make my footprint as small as possible.
@colinwalker This sounds like a project I should consider for over winter recess.
@colinwalker always good to reduce silo footprints :)