Above the Fold: The Blog

It seems as though every time I open my favourite news sites or turn on a technology strand on TV, someone is talking about social network sites. They are usually declaring their evils, claiming them to be the haunts of pedophiles and criminals, or just pointing out the amount of time employees waste on them every day when they should be doing some form of paid work.

Social networking sites only seem have to have popped onto the mainstream radar over the last eighteen months or two years. Most commentators talk as though they`re entirely new things, invented with the creation of Facebook and unheard of before.

I take that claim with a pinch of salt. My first introduction to the Internet was the discovery of message boards when I was hunting for some information on a new TV show that I had just discovered, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, I stumbled on the message board on the official website. It was called the Bronze (after a nightclub in the show) and it was a place for fans to meet, chat and socialise. When the show moved to a different network and the original site was shut down, the Bronze migrated to The Bronze Beta. It didn`t have all the bells and whistles of Facebook or MySpace, but the key elements (connecting people on-line through similar interests, creating a network of friends) were all there. That first trip into the Bronze was in 1999, around the same time that LiveJournal (one of the biggest and earliest social networking sites) began.

Things are more sophisticated now. The interfaces are more polished (one no longer needs to know HTML in order to post a simple message at most social networking sites, for example!) with better archiving and organisation possibilities. The back-ends are much more complicated and often more stable (although some LJ users might disagree at times). The purpose hasn`t changed, though.

The Internet is an amazing resource if you want to know something, but for me it has always been about communication and connecting with people. I check out my LiveJournal and Ravelry account most days to catch up with the friends that I have met through fandom and knitting and see what`s going on in the various communities I contribute to. I pop into Facebook a couple of times a week to see how friends from school and previous employments are doing and read their gossip. If I see a post in a community that looks interesting, I`ll click through to see what else that person has said or done and possibily find a new friend.

The mechanics are different from those early days on the Bronze, but nothing fundamental has changed. The social Internet has been around for far longer than any of those commentators will admit, the only difference is that it is now discussed on the BBC and CNN rather than whispered about in industry conventions.

It took a couple of weeks, but I finally have a computer and an Internet connection in my house. Canada is awesome and I’m very excited about settling in here.

My Internet connection is amazing - 15MB download speed and it’s not strangled anywhere (unlike my ISP in England strangling all Torrents). The hard bit will be remembering that I can’t abuse my new-found Internet powers!

Tomorrow I am off into the great unknown, more commonly referred to as Nova Scotia, Canada. Big step, but I am very excited.

Or at least I will be once I am through customs and secure in my new house!

This blog has been cleaned up, dusted down, upgraded to the latest of everything and made properly functional again. Hooray!

On checking the status of the blog a couple of weeks ago, I noted that the posts were ordered backwards. A quick search of the forums revealed that this was a common problem when hosts had upgraded their MySQL and users had not upgraded their WP blog (guilty as charged) but unfortunately I jetted off to Canada for a few days and I have only just had the time to sit down and properly sort out the upgrades.

Never mind. I’ve dusted off with the intention of being a little better at blogging here so we’ll see how it goes this time.

I have been putting off making this post for a while, largely because I had not quite made a decision. Well, now is the time to make this post and begin the next chapter of Above The Fold.

This blog was originally created to provide regularly updated content for this site and reassure visitors that I haven’t simply slapped a portfolio up on the web and never touched it again. I had vague intentions of blogging about things that might be of interest, but I wasn’t sure quite what that would be and over time I’ve written the odd post on politics, some food things and even some funny work stories mingled with the slightly more technical posts. It’s never had a consistent theme, though, apart from an intention that it will not contain personal things that only friends and family would be interested in.

That intention has not changed and it’s time that I dusted things off, began again and this time actually write with some idea of what the blog is really about as well as what ultimate purpose it serves within the context of the a portfolio site.

A large part of this decision was inspired by an article on A List Apart about writing for the web and for blogs and it has some very sensible suggestions. The point that resonated most was about knowing why you’re writing being as important as what you’re writing and writing as if for a single reader rather than trying to cater to an “audience”.

My decision to keep personal things off this blog still stands and to that end I’ll be setting up something separate for friends and family to keep up with my activities and keep in contact. This blog will be what it should be: a blog with purpose, sharing interesting or useful websites that I have found, passing on tips and tricks found through my work, discussing projects that I am involved in - analytical or web related - and filled with my excitement at finding some new cool technical gadget or piece of software. In short, it will be related to the rest of this portfolio and my professional life with a commitment to write at least two articles a month.

I hope.