Tag: Social Media, Communication and Technology

Stuffed

I started off, way back now in March, swearing to get on top of all this cyber stuff – social media communication –  and I launched myself bravely into Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn and WordPress as well as continuing to write and market my first book, Raiding Cúailnge, start research for my second book – tentatively titled “Three Spears” and actually live a normal life with all that entails – getting up in the morning, feeding the chickens, pottering around in the garden, going for a short cycle, endlessly devising the shortest and flattest routes between home and other points and all the other humdrum aspects of daily life.

And I’m stuffed.

I’ve just about managed to continue WordPress and my three blogs – Celtic Trivia, Book Stuff and Curves-  and start scribbling notes for Three Spears but I am afraid everything else has gone by the board. I just don’t seem to have the time to do them all and certainly I can’t remember the last time I bothered to look at Twitter or LinkedIn.

As for Facebook …

I remember a knowledgeable guru told me that I should narrow my focus and concentrate on just one aspect of social media.  “Make it yours” he told me sternly and he opined that I should focus on Facebook.

Well, of course I didn’t and I suppose it is too late now given that I seem to have poured my energy into WordPress. I think it is the fact that WordPress remains a bit similar to the hole in a tree down in the local park (which I cycle past). I post stuff here and I feel it is the same as if I stuff it into a hole in the tree and I have no idea if anyone ever reads it or bothers to look at it but for some obscure reason, I enjoy shoving a nugget into the bole of the tree and leaving it there for someone to discover – posthumously!

Whereas with Facebook, I feel constrained in some way I haven’t fully analysed as yet. I think it all comes down to that vague, unidentifiable fear I mentioned ages ago – hmm, on Facebook or on Word Press? I am sure it is just a question of tightening up a nut here and a screw there and making a few fine adjustments to the way I present my Facebook page but at the moment – although I haven’t checked for weeks – I feel inundated with Facebook things – are they posts, tweets, messages, mails? – with the whole world constantly updating their whatever it is and uploading new photos of themselves – I can tell because I get a constant barrage of beeps and whistles from my mobile phone telling me that I “can’t be a man ‘cos (I) don’t smoke the same cigarettes as (you)” – thank you Nanker Phelge.

Anyway, the point is that while I struggle to continue with the triad of blogs on WordPress as well as continuing to work on Three Spears, I just don’t seem to have the time to mess around on FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ and I have yet to make a hash of Tumblr, Instagram and Gawd knows what else I can ignore!

Parents!

cropped-p8170324.jpg
CURVES

I know, I know, this has nothing to do with parenthood.  This is all about errant posts and categories and the hierarchy within them – hence the notion of parents and aberrant children and my dismal attempts to herd posts from one category into another.

A note on Irish Kingdoms that should have been catalogued (by who?) under the overall heading of, for example, Celtic Trivia somehow ends up under Book News while a post like Celtic Weapons ends up in the Curves folder.

I’m more used to filing , i.e. keeping similar documents in one folder and I suppose I was expecting wordpress to be the same, or at least that it would be relatively easy to assign any post, no matter how grossly mis-categorised, to its proper and intended location.

Not so, it seems, despite the fact that, even with help from a friend, it still took us half the morning to figure it out.

Anyway, so now shoot me if any of my childlike posts end up in the wrong parent category!

Duh!

cropped-p8170324.jpg
CURVES

I feel like an eejit.  I’m just beginning to figure this damn thing out.  It really is easy.  I am appalled at how difficult I must have made it appear in my mind because I genuinely found the whole experience a bit off-putting and whenever I attempted to do anything, it was with a vague and undefined feeling of apprehension.

Does that make sense?

It was almost as if I half believed that this technology, this social media communication stuff, would all be a bit beyond me, which, of course, is nonsense, given my (kind of) earlyish start in computer literacy – that’s what it used to be called then, although I don’t know if that term is still in use nowadays.

Having said that, there is always the possibility that things (i.e. me) can go wrong again and in attempting to do some minor task, like drag the post “realisations” under the blog Curves, I will inadvertently bring disaster down on my head.  See?  There I go again, the vague feeling of … almost trespassing, as it were.

I remember, a couple of years ago, in Hong Kong, well, actually more like a dozen years or so now, some kids wrote in their journals that their parents used email while they used SMS or something that I had never heard of.  I realised then that I was the same age as their parents and that I used only emails, having long abandoned  the former conventions of landline phones and handwritten letters.

So, did I make an active decision then to stop learning new things?  I wouldn’t have thought, so but what then explains my reluctance to embrace  – is it a new technology or a new way of communicating?

 

Learning Curves

cropped-p8170324.jpg
CURVES

Ok, I think this is the start of my learning curves.  All I have to do now is start linking my website or blog – I have to admit that I am not one hundred percent sure which is which at this point but I suppose that is the point of a learning curve – to things like FaceBook (another black hole in my cyber knowledge) and Twitter and Google and … Gawd, what else is there?

Anyway, I have my toes in the water and I don’t suppose there is any fear of my drowning just yet although I am struggling a bit to know just exactly what I am doing.  I can’t quite seem to get a handle on my different pages / posts that I want to have – one for Celtic Trivia, another for  Book Stuff and then this third one for my Learning Curves.

OK, Another day, another crack at this daft thing.

I wonder should my Celtic Trivia stuff should be a post or a page?

Where are my menus?  I want to have a home page with menus directing you – the insatiable reader to the different parts of my thingy – Gawd, that sounds a bit weird.

Easter Sunday Night

I  haven’t made much of an effort recently on this thing so I am going to try something new on – I’m going to put up an album of photos on Facebook.

Oh Gawd! you all groan, pictures of -my mother and her generation called them snaps) stuff we don’t remember. Anyway, here goes – actually, should the pictures (snaps?) be in WordPress or FaceBook?

Going to try FaceBook first.

Cheerio

01 April 2016

(Red-faced with embarrassment) well, under the influence of an excellent bottle of Penfolds Bin 389 Cabernet Shiraz – like drinking a dark, rich liquid velvet – I stumbled onto my Facebook page on Easter Sunday night and attempted to create an album of Gargoyles (why I couldn’t tell you) but all I seemed to have managed was to upload about 80 random photos  but nothing like an organised album.  Surely it can’t be that difficult!  Anyway, ‘Nuff said about that for the moment.

On to other things.

Yesterday, surrounded by, no doubt, out-of-date library reference books on Word Press and social media, my laptop open to online tutorials beside the desktop computer which seemed to have at least a dozen open tabs, I lurched unevenly from page to post and screen to screen, and finally managed to change my background Theme and to – I think – set up some menus to guide whatever unfortunate lands on these muddled attempts.  Oh, by the way, I also discovered that what should have been Posts were, in fact, Pages so having laboriously changed that, I now should have two (2) static pages (Home & About Me) – that means the info’ there will probably not change dramatically over the course of this learning curve – and three (3) Posts (Celtic Trivia, Curves & Book Stuff) which I will add to several times each week (if I can think of anything!)