While I’m settling into the WordPress format and repairing whatever mistakes I’ve made along the way, I’ve also made up a new home page for the Mac, one I’d set up a long time ago but never got into.
Netvibes was a good choice for a home page since it allows many widgets and plugins and stuff to fill the page easily with what I’m mainly interested in seeing first thing on the screen. One gets used to a certain arrangement of things–guess that’s why they call it “home.” But my Excite page that I’ve always used for years had stopped making the investment portfolio available and once upon a time that was vital info to me. I’ve since found a few different plugins that serve the purpose, but really, I don’t even want to watch my future crumble in today’s scenario. The only other thing I really liked at Excite was a local tv listings grid and while I can’t find something like that, I’ve been able to delete most of the other data off the site and just link to Excite for that purpose. A bit more trouble, but I’m adapting.
What I don’t have completely set up yet and have been working on is a Public Netvibes page–though even in its undeveloped form it’s had two requests for befriending; one of which was a request to help the user learn English whereby he’d teach me Turkish in return.
Which brings me to some of the other social networking systems I’ve joined, such as twitter and Facebook. I like twitter; it allows me to voice those little random thoughts or doings that run through the day. Since I’ve been asked not to twitter so often, I’ve learned to curb my urges to tweet on impulse, though I suppose any who don’t like what I do or say have full freedom to stop following me. I don’t follow a lot of those who follow me; maybe I’m just antisocial, but it doesn’t seem necessary to me to have hundreds of so-named ‘friends’ when I don’t have anything in common with them except for the service itself. Same with Facebook; I know lots of people on Facebook but I’ve only invited one person to follow me, though I’ve responded to all who have asked me the same.
What’s odd about Facebook, to me, is that in searching around, there are so many people I know but they are all from different parts and times of my life. It just would seem odd to merge family, co-workers, friends, etc. all together on one plane in time. This is something I need to investigate further.
The weblog is what I’m most comfortable with working in. Perhaps it’s just my stubborn streak in learning the new, or making changes, or adding to what is already a heavy writing schedule and scattered arena of the internet. This too is something I need to delve into further; to find a place or two that brings everything together in their own separate modules.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology
The new digs are awesome, Susan.
and I totally agree about Facebook: it IS weird to have all the different paths of our life show up on one page.
I have to be really careful about what I post there because the work group does NOT know I have a blog and never will!
Thanks, Loretta! I’ve got to do some more playing around with it but it offers more possibilities though Typepad is certainly getting more flexible all the time.
Someone else mentioned about the merging of memories into a single format, and she is a young woman who doesn’t even have the trail of people in her wake that you and particularly I (since I’m lots older!) would have. Facebook just seems to too easily feed a random reader too much background information on people simply by their sorting methods.