Facebook and Wordpess occupied my life for a bit last night. I had kept Facebook locked up tight for a number of months. I still have mixed feelings about Facebook because I frequently observe relatives, friends and others devoting a great deal of time to the site.
I once repaired the network settings on my niece’s laptop. When the device was finally connected to the Internet I launched a browser and simply selected history to quickly launch a web site to verify that all was okay with her network access. I was surprised to see that for the previous three days the only site she had visited was Facebook.
The second reason I have mixed feelings about Facebook is the lack of real control.
The third reason I have mixed feelings about Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. Knob. Enough said.
I created a Facebook page called History & Tech Resources that will act as a launch pad for the sharing of links and resources for my students and any other interested party that cares to link to the page. I have not allowed interactivity. These are three reasons why:
- I cannot guarantee that any comments, images or video contributed to the page would be suitable
- I do not have the time to moderate everything that may be uploaded
- My employer would probably prefer it that way and I am not in the mood to make waves
As part of the process I created a TinyURL of the site so I can easily share it with others on whiteboards, etc. It is http://tinyurl.com/historytech. While on that point have you preserved TinyUrls of your sites? I created http://tinyurl.com/johnlarkin for this web site.
I also trawled through my own Facebook presence organising “friends” into lists, responding to ancient messages from the twilight zone and relaxing some sharing settings and tightening up others. This capture shows my current privacy regime.
As you can see privacy is tight. Only the privileged can see into my world and not every man and his dog. That is not all. I checked the connecting settings as well. That check-in feature needs to be switched off in two places. Facebook is still a privacy nightmare.
What about WordPress? I have been experimenting with WordPress multisite and since the WordPress 3.1 upgrade multisite has been badly affected. The user experience deteriorated as well. Plug-ins were borked and duplicating sites became a nightmare.
So, I made a significant decision and killed multisite. I do not have the time to be repairing this, that and the other. I can explore it again later. I wish to enjoy using WordPress, not despise it.
I backed up the MySQL database and the files on the server first. I removed the relevant code from the htaccess and wp-config files and no more network. I then had to re-install and reconfigure a number of plug-ins. The RSS feed works better now.
Finally I installed a plug-in called Wordbooker that allows me to send posts to my Facebook page and the History & Tech Resources page. This will be the first post that demonstrates that (I hope).
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