Tag: web-presence

Cheddar StalagmitesIn my previous post, The World Is Still Spinning, I noticed that I missed posting an article the week before. This gave me pause for thought and I decided to look back over what I have written about over the 2 years since the very first post.

To help me gather together my thoughts on what I had written I thought it might be a good idead to collect some notes and links to the various types of posts I have written. This grew a bit out of hand to be included in last weeks post so I though it best to release this summary of my blog so far as a separate entity. But be warned, even on it’s own it’s quite a long post though…

Anyway I hope you enjoy it and please leave a comment if you feel so inclined…

Inquisitive BirdSomehow I completely forgot to post something last Friday. I haven’t missed a week since I started nearly 2 years ago so I started to feel that I had really let myself down…

But guess what, nothing happened. The world is still spinning even though I missed my, self imposed, weekly posting schedule…

I didn’t even notice until about Tuesday. I just happened to go to my blog to reference something I wrote a while ago. Then I noticed that the latest post was written 10 days ago. Oops…

So is this a big deal or not?

Website DesignA redesign for my business facing website, over at peteoshea.co.uk, has been on the cards for a while now.

I did try and set up a second blog with the idea of keeping more technical posts separate, at least that way the website would have some useful content.

That didn’t really work out though as I didn’t have time to come up with twice the content. In the end I thought it best to try and keep all of my content in one place anyway so I ported the handful of posts back to this site.

So once again the website on my business cards pointed somewhere that wasn’t very useful or informative…

The challenge then started to create a simple, static website to explain what I can offer.

Rocky View of DartmoorMy last Monthly Review was back in March. I explained that I was going to try writing less frequent reviews in the hope of tackling some of the larger items on my list of Yearly Goals.

So now we’ve reached the mid way point in the year it’s time to sit down and work out how I’m doing so far. I’m going to go through each point in turn and update my progress on each one. This post got a bit too big to put out all in one go so I have decided to split it into 2 posts.

This first part covers the first three sections, Friends & Family, Business and Health & Fitness. Then on Tuesday I am going to post the rest.

I know this is a bit of a break from the usual Friday but I have decided to try and change my posting day to a Tuesday instead from now on. Fridays are always a little bit busy, making sure everything is wrapped up before the weekend so I thought I would try something new.

Writing ToolsI am still officially on holiday so this is just going to be a short post today. When I sat down to write this post I logged into WordPress and as usual there were hundreds of comments marked as spam…

I was about to start writing about the Family Holiday and post some photos thereof but seeing all those spam comments made my heart sink. Previously I used to check through all of these messages to make sure there were no real comments that slipped through the net. In the very early days there was a message or two that ended up in the spam list. Since then though I haven’t had a single false positive result.

So why should I still check through all of those spam messages. Well the answer is that I’m not going to bother any more…

Bookshelf

BookshelfI have recently finished reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferris and have just added a short comment and rating for it on Goodreads. I do plan on writing a bit more of a thorough review in a post in the near future but that isn’t the point. When I logged in to my account on Goodreads I noticed that it says that I have 0 friends…

It is never nice to be told you have no friends so I thought I would try and do something about it.

That gave me the idea for this post. I would like all of you bookworms out there to join up and hopefully my number of friends will slowly creep upwards…

Lake District ViewIf there are a few people on Facebook with the same name as you it can make it hard for friends and family to find you. How do you go about letting them know how to get to your profile?

My personal facebook profile is at www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=720276742. This is a bit of a mouthful to say the least and is prone to typos.

I recently found out how to set up a username so now you can just go to www.facebook.com/peteoshea. This is much easier to relay to any potential friends…

Please bear in mind that I only accept people I know as friends on my personal profile. I also have a Facebook page for readers of this blog. The usual address of that is www.facebook.com/pages/peteoshea/134113493281729 which is also far too long to remember. You can also set up a username for any page you may maintain but you have to have at least 25 fans, or people who like the page. I haven’t reached that number yet so instead I have created a much shorter link, peteoshea.co.uk/facebook, which redirects to my Facebook page.

Sound interesting, then read on…

Not NervousI have just worked out how to attach an image to my e-mail address for any comments I make on this blog, and pretty much any other blog or forum, so I thought I would share with you all how you can do the same.

This picture is known as an avatar. This a simple way of creating a graphical representation of yourself.

You could use a simple head shot, like I do, a photo of some faraway place, some sort of cartoon character or pretty much anything really.

Avatars are used all over the internet and are a great way for people to put their stamp on anything the write. On Facebook, for example, your avatar is known as your profile picture. This then appears against any comment you make anywhere on the site.

I am going to show you how to set up an avatar that will automatically be attached to any comment you make using your e-mail address.

Butterfly CaughtWhen I started this blog I planned on posting some differing length articles, trying to find a natural balance between the available time and length of posts. Once I started writing all my articles seem to reach a natural length of around 1000 words. That doesn’t mean I’m aiming for posts to reach that size, it just seems to happen.

This takes a little longer each week than I had originally planned. Last week I was getting close to missing my allocated posting slot. If that starts happening then I know that it will not be too long before I give up completely replacing this with something more important.

So I decided to do something about it. I found something else less important that I could cut back on. Hence the post about Information Overload.

The moral is keep going if at all possible. Even if you are travelling at a snails pace you will still get there in the end.

As I am a bit short of time this week I am just going to do a short post about the pictures I have been using on this site. As you may have noticed most of the images are not mine even though I am a keen amateur photographer.

Information OverloadI remember when you entered a search on the internet, before the likes of Google, and you were lucky to get a handful of links to choose from and most would contain useful information. You could happily surf, clicking through links to other sites and feel like you were doing something useful. The internet is now full of noise with pages full of flashing adverts and even link farms where there is no valuable information at all, just links to other websites, and the owner even gets paid when someone clicks any of the links.

The signal to noise ratio had become unbearable, so I turned away from the wonder that is the internet.  The only way to find out something was to use a search engine, like google, and trawl through the thousands of links returned, hoping to find the specific piece of information you were after.

Then I started to come across other ways of finding useful information. Blogs and RSS feeds.

Once you have found a source you find interesting you can be updated whenever that website releases a new article. I have now gone from one extreme to the other, reading as many articles, blog posts, essays and even e-books as I can about a multitude of different things.

In fact I would say that I have reached Information Overload, hence the title of this post. The question is what can I do about it?