I just finished paying for my online hosting service and domain registration so I guess this blog will continue for another year, God willing. That got me thinking about social media in general and how my online activity and presence may have changed in the past 20 years. My conclusion – it has and it hasn’t.
A lot of what I do online hasn’t changed from the way I did things 20 years ago. I still belong to a number of text based technical and specialty forums where I type posts just as before. I don’t have a smartphone so I don’t take photos with it and immediately post online. (I use a real camera although it’s digital now.) As a result I don’t have an Instagram account. I have discovered YouTube but I don’t make videos so mostly I just learn how to fix stuff or listen to YouTube music. I do a little bit with Reddit.
My main social media outlets are Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. Twitter I find limiting and rather juvenile so I just link my blog through it. LinkedIn keeps me in touch with former work colleagues and Facebook is great for old and new friends, relatives etc.
I used to program a website with HTML as my personal “brand presence” on the Web, but that sort of activity has largely been supplanted by WordPress software or any of the many blogging sites out there. My blog is hosted on my own domain by a web server company and it’s all basically point and click. It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. I have a WordPress theme and all the spam filtering and other tools I need for a website are close at hand. If I didn’t want to do that I could just register at a blog site and type away. I try not to do “fake news” and I don’t advertise or charge anything. I hope some of my online friends and family enjoy what I have to say.
So that’s my Social Media presence. Not very flashy, but I hope to continue for a while.
