So, if you haven't seen it yet, I have updated my blog layout! I have really been wanting to design a minimalistic blog, and with Blogger's new design editor, and a little bit of modifications done by yours truly, I think I've finally been able to pull off the look I've been wanting. What do you think? Oh, and are there any weird coding problems, let me know so I can fix them.
Actually, there's been quite a lot of changes going around here. Recently, I have been attempting to get my social networking sites all in order. Although I'm not entirely sure if it's effective, I'd like to share with you my goal in organizing these sites.
First of all, let me lay down the social networking sites I primarily use and the goals for their use:
- Facebook - A more personal and intimate hub for what's going on with me, Facebook will be primarily for close friends and family. So, if I've deleted you from my friends recently, please don't be offended. You can easily follow me elsewhere for updates.
- Twitter - I'll be using this as a public, quick, anything-goes status update.
- Flickr - For pictures I feel comfortable sharing with the world and posting directly to my blog. As soon as I get a mobile phone with a good camera, I'll be posting more, I hope!
- YouTube - I'm not overly active over at YouTube, hopefully I will be soon; again, when I get a decent mobile phone. Right now, it's just full of subscriptions I follow and whatnot. Probably boring for most of my readers.
- Picasa - As my Picasa album is nearly full and I'm unwilling to pay a monthly fee for expanding my capacity, it's simply a dead archive at this point. I am, however, considering other solutions for sharing photos, such as DivvyShot or Facebook (for friends and family only, of course). But with great Blogger integration, it's rather hard to give up.
- Google Reader - I cannot begin to tell you how much I love Google Reader -- but that's for another post. As I go through my daily feeds, I occasionally share items I think are rather interesting. So publicly, G. Reader a direct access to all articles I want to share with the world.
The setup:
My blog will serve as the main outlet for my personal content: articles, thoughts and other larger updates going on in my life. And, as most bloggers say they do, I'd really like to start writing (or at least posting) in my blog more often.
Media content will be retrieved from Flickr and YouTube to enhance the blog. And from there, information about my blog will be sent to Facebook and Twitter, where Followers can be redirected to my blog.
Shared information and other fun stuff, such as from Google Reader, goes directly into Facebook and I have to manually send those links to Twitter (as Twitter is more public and you know what they say about
online reputations).
Thankfully, a lot of this is automated due to a variety of services, such as
FriendFeed, a
lifestreaming service, and
FeedBurner, a service from Google designed to enhance your feeds.
Is it an effective way of managing my social content?
Hm, that could be a tough one to answer. It does feel rather sloppily put together. Ideally, I would like to use one main service to manage everything, rather than making use several automatic "helper" services.
In the meantime, this is my aim to get things in order. I'll let you know how it turns out.