graham’s blog

Social Networks: Relevance?

I don’t make a secret of my age so when I was looking at social networks I tried Orkut, MySpace and of course FaceBook. I can’t seem to get back into Orkut but that’s not a problem. I don’t check into Myspace very often and only a little less than Facebook. Facebook is harder to avoid as I have many friends and acquaintances over there.

Another social network I tried was TeeBeeDee because I thought that as it was a site geared for people over 40 it might have more relevance to me. It turns out however that it hasn’t impacted on my experience and that’s a shame as there are some really splendid people over on the site.

I decided to cancel my membership today and earlier the administrators took an interest in why I had left and I wrote them an email detailing my issues.

It sums up a lot of what I feel so I’m inserting portions here.

“There are a lot of awfully nice people on TeeBeeDee and none better than the
crew that runs it. I had a very warm welcome and it befits your service to
express concern on my departure.

I came to TeeBeeDee as a backlash of the FaceBook disaster. I’m 56 and
proud of that and I don’t really fit in with the FaceBook crowd although I’m
a confirmed geek and spend a *lot* of my time online.

[...]

In the end however TeeBeeDee is centered around the nice folks in the USA
and I’m an Englishman living in the French speaking part of Switzerland and
the cultural difference is uncomfortable.

My Mother’s day is on another day, there is no Father’s Day, we don’t really
celebrate Halloween and certainly not Thanksgiving or Labor Day (just some
examples).

So I don’t really feel that I “belong” in spite of everything.

The other reason is that I can’t devote as much time as I could/should being
spread out on the web and pulled in all webdirections at the same time.

I hope this helps to explain the reasons for my departure.”

Changing Directions

I’ve been maintaining blogs for over 7 years and the history on this one goes back to August 2003 which is almost 5 years.

Before starting this blog I had a LiveJournal blog and before that I maintained my own pure html site provided by my ISP.

I’ve gone through a few domain changes too. The first domain I purchased was wynderful.net. This was because at the time I was gaming on Asheron’s Call and my character was called Wynderful (Wyn) for short. I wanted to be somewhat anonymous so I set things up on wynderful.net.

I still own that domain by the way but use it with my .Mac account and play around with my photo projects. It’s another work in progress but I’ll let you know when it’s presentable.

Then I purchased justgraham.net and now I use it as a labo site for testing stuff and installing various webware.

I changed my hosting over a year ago and now Siteground handles my newer sites and also my clients websites. It’s a good service and I’m happy with them (that’s why I agreed to host a banner).

This brings me to the purpose of this post which is to introduce the new look and focus of this site.

As you can see, I’ve changed (once again) the theme and hope to render the whole blog easier to navigate. The trouble with a purely chronological layout is that posts tend to drop off the radar after a while and if you, the visitor, don’t visit for a while you might miss something that I wrote a few days, weeks or months ago.

I have almost 800 posts, so there is a lot of material. A while ago I started a lot of work behind the scenes. Before the advent of tags (or my use of them) in WordPress I used categories and was left with lots of categories and few tags. I spent some considerable time converting categories to tags and tidying the remaining categories into something workable.

I am therefore highlighting Features, News and three categories and a lead post on the front page together with links to categories and links to posts by month. I am having to sacrifice some widgets but will be working on the theme to extend the page length.

I hope these changes will be to your liking. One major difference is that all my posts in French will be available from the front page without disrupting the flow for the majority of readers not speaking French - unless I have a silent majority which I doubt.

I think it’s a good change although it still needs a little tweaking. I hope to be able to increase the width and make the font larger so as to be easier to read.

Let me know what you think.

I’ve chosen to illustrate this story with a recent photo of David Jennifer that was taken during a visit to a local Chinese Restaurant with friends visiting from the USA. Enjoy!