everything new is old again
Posted: March 27, 2020 Filed under: Blogging, Facebook, Social media Leave a comment
I like having one place to go to read all of the new posts for the blogs I follow along with daily updates from pages such as NPR Arts & Life. This was made easy a number of years ago with the advent of RSS, Really Simple Syndication. All you needed was a web site or app that supported the protocol. For a long time a lot of us used Google Reader, which was well suited for the task. But Google can be like a child with a short attention span who gets bored easily, and it dropped Google Reader a while back, sending lots of people scrambling. I have since been using a service called NewsBlur, which I can access from my web browser or by using their iOS app on my iPhone and iPad. It works well.
The problem is that RSS support has become spotty. Bosco Peters, an Anglican priest in New Zealand, has a wonderful blog called Liturgy. When Bosco redid his web site the RSS feed was lost, and his attempts to fix it were unsuccessful. My friend Tahoe Mom resurrected her blog at a new site and it has no RSS feed. Frustrating.
I suppose the predominance of social media has rendered RSS nearly obsolete. That’s unfortunate, because in these days and times I try to stay away from social media except for Instagram, and I especially work at keeping off Facebook except for my Episcopal Church of the Good Shepherd communication tasks.
To invert the words of that catchy Peter Allen song: Everything new is old again.
idle time
Posted: November 19, 2019 Filed under: Books, Facebook, Social media Leave a commentI don’t believe that I’m the only person who finds it easy to consume idle time by picking up my iPhone and scrolling through Facebook. And it’s easy to let that be a time sink. The powers behind social media know how to use the same techniques used by casinos to keep you there rather than simply moving on.
I’m trying to break that habit. I have discovered that it is easy and comfortable to read a Kindle book on my iPhone 8, something that was not the case with my antiquated iPhone 5s. So I am consciously training myself to click the Facebook icon, take a quick look and then move on to whatever book I am reading on my iPhone Kindle app (which will always be different from what I am reading on my iPad Kindle app). Facebook is making this easier for me by showing me posts that are several days old high in my newsfeed and by burying the Most Recent link.
More book reading, less Facebook. That is a Good Thing.
how silly is that?
Posted: March 23, 2011 Filed under: Facebook Leave a commentI have added a few new Facebook friends recently. I've made a couple of requests and accepted a couple of requests. I looked at my profile the other day and saw I had 99 friends. 99! "Wow," I thought. I've got to get to 100." So I made a couple of friend requests: one to someone whose blog I read and one to a member of the Episcopal community who looked like quite an interesting person. Both accepted my request. So now I have 101 Facebook friends.
And that means….what exactly?
my point being 