Working on the PC with crocodile and vodka tonic

I had a few reasons for wanting to restart this blog. The first one is for fun. I enjoy writing, but I don’t get to do enough of it. In the last few years Twitter and Facebook had replaced this blog as where I was putting things on the internet.

Twitter can be fun to write for. But quite often you want a lot more than 140 characters.

Facebook allows you more words, but most people don’t read much more than is in a tweet. I saw a recent recommendation of picture and just 250 characters for the best engagement there! My Facebook audience is pretty restricted as well, as I have less than 40 “friends” and little interest in making my profile public.

I also would rather my content was fully public, on my own platform, than controlled by Facebook and monetised by them. They recently surveyed me on what I thought of their privacy options. I noticed that all the choices they offer only allow you to control what your contacts and the public see. You have almost no control over what Facebook do with your content (and it is yours) and activity. BTW I am a big fan of Max Schrems.

Then there is the thing about the social and engagement side. I am as guilty as the next person of occasionally obsessing about my likes, re-tweets and favorites. But that’s so shallow really. So I am going back to the basics – Am I enjoying writing. And are people getting some benefit from what I am writing. That is easily measured by site traffic, and people commenting on what they see.

The only other thing I need to sort out is work. My current role is a bit higher profile. And I have even been blogging for work. I want to write a bit about technology and the cloud world, but I am not sure whether that will work alongside some of the other content that will be here. A separate work blog may be needed as well.

For now the plan is to post something, big or small at least once a day. Few posts will be over 350 words. I will post on my usual eclectic range of interests – technology, history, sci-fi, current affairs, business travel, the places I get to visit at work, and reflections on life from someone whos own life is pretty non-standard 🙂

Anyway. It is good to be back!

Things I need to do to tidy all of this up:

• Finish tweaking the theme (currenly using Hemingway) – Done  for now.
• Fix the site settings, including checking:
  • Comments – Done
  • Spam filters – Done
• Add an “About” page for the blog – to clarify why am back here – Done
• Add an “About” page for me – placeholder in, er, place. I need proper content.
• Add a side bar with some links – Done
• See can I migrate the old posts to this site
• Add a decent photo/image sharing widget – Done I think. I have added NextGen Gallery. Let’s see how it works later.
• Social media integration – Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook – Done. Sharing icons added.
• Decide if/how I will use this for work
• Add some permanent pages, and remove the current sample one – In progress.