Blogging

The Story of My Blog Turning 20

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This blog turns 20 years old today. I have tried to think of something else I’ve been doing consistently like this blog for a longer time. Other then working in technology I’m really not coming up with anything.

2003 does feel like multiple worlds away when thinking about it. I would not have predicted keeping up this habit on and off for 20 years. Who knew that this novel at the time concept of publicly writing about what you’re thinking that Gus showed me would endear for so long.

I know I go through bouts of not publishing and then writing more content than I can publish however it’s always been something that I enjoy doing. Let’s see if I make another 20 years.

The Story of My Blog Being Old Enough to Drink (In The UK At Least)

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What feels like several lifetimes ago I started this blog. In reality it was 18 years ago today. It is so weird to think how much my life has changed in those 18 years. There may have been dry spells where I did not write for a while (a year or so now and again) I have continuously journaled in that 18 years. For someone who used to get claustrophobic in 2 year mobile phone contracts I am impressed that I kept at it.

With a long list of post ideas here is hoping for another 18.

Who Knew My URL Vanity Would Hurt Page Rank

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At the tail end of last year I retitled this blog. I did it to better represent what it had evolved into. It also represented future ventures I was going to have after moving. The other reason is I really didn’t have any sort of name for it. It was a sad state of affairs.

At the time I made a conscious decision not to change the URL of the site. That was because over the years I had changed it a few times and really got no value out of making the change.  I wrote about the history of this site here. I kept simply blog.Scott.ac. It represented one of my oldest domains and that this was a blog. I also liked the simple domain name scott dot something.  Since then I’ve had some time to read about how page ranking works in search engines. Apparently the fact that my site is a.AC domain significantly hurts searches. That is because it gets priority in the country localization that is the Ascension Islands. I generally write this blog for me however I do put some effort into it so having an optimized to get more views is a nice bonus. Who knew that the reason I liked the old URL was causing it to not get much visibility like it used to.

Having used the site title “A Scott Odyssey” for about seven or eight months now, I kind of like it. I relate a lot to the theme of the Odyssey, journey that I wrote more about it on this blogs “About Blog” page.

The Story Of My Returned Motivation To Write

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I am not so sure who “they” are however “they” say to start at the beginning. For this post thinking about where that beginning is has been murky. When I moved to London I had over a dozen different drafts of things I wanted to write about. I still have most of those drafts and would love to write about those topics. The realities of the move were I had little time to write when we first arrived. In early January when we arrived that was not a problem since I had a backlog of 4 to 6 weeks of written material to use on my posting schedule.  I just depended on how many posts I wanted to schedule per week. At one point I had 3 posts scheduled a week and I was able to streach things out by going down to two.

Then everything changed in mid-January. I  got the call that my dad was dying.  It wasn’t a surprise.  It was unexpectedly so soon.  He had been sick for a while.  The whole situation unfolded much more suddenly than I had thought. By the time I went back to New York and returned back to London I was focused more on getting back into my routine dealing with our shipping container that writing.

At some point I want to write a lot more about my dad’s death however not ready to do that yet.  In any event I still had all these ideas about writing, I just didn’t want to. Over the past few months I posted quick blurbs that I’ve thought about however nothing substantial. This also translated into not really journaling much privately either.  That was something I really enjoyed doing.  I ended up simply logging where I had gone with hopes of going back and writing some blurbs later.

Besides the lack of motivation, it was very challenging to find time. On one hand it is easy to say I was busy.  I have read enough to know that busy is a terrible excuse.  If something was important to me I would simply find time. The reality of the situation was I was depressed about my dad and tired from trying to adopt a new routine.  All I wanted to do at the end of a day when the girls were in sleep was to relax. In recent weeks my wife and I have both felt much more at ease that we are finally settled in. That has helped in getting me to journal more in recent weeks.

Now I feel like I am in the right place to start branching out into blog posts. That brings me to this post. I didn’t need to write all that, however as with much of my writing it felt therapeutic to write it.  And that is why I am writing about this topic as my first full post in a while.

My Decor Choices in the New House, Oh I Mean The Blog Has a New Name

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That picture is the decor of the master bedroom in our new house. Ok maybe not. I am not sure if MC would be cool with that. I really did not ask. If she is then I might totally go for that minus the monolith. Unless the Monolith has a flat screen in it.

The main reason for this post is after I wrote my blog renaming post yet before it was published this Wednesday I came up with what I feel is a great name for this site, A Scott Odyssey.  I have had a few names over the years but have never focused on the name aspect of the site identity.  I have fixated more on the URL and as i have written before i kept coming back to what i am using today.  With my track record in waffling on names and URL’s i may change both in 6 months.

I think “A Scott Odyssey” is something fun and semi descriptive enough.  I also feel that it avoids all the things I highlighted I do not want to do when I renamed. On one hand writing about this is too much technical side of the blog itself however this is the minutia I OCD over. I like the Odyssey part and the play on words from 2001. Life is an Odyssey and this move we are taking is the next Chapter in it. Here is to another 14 years of writing at “A Scott Odyssey”.

Expat Blogging Minus The Catchy Title

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One thing I want to continue to do is to blog internal about my experiences. Since our family is moving overseas it makes logical sense to write a lot more about being an expat and all the new things were going to be doing in England. In researching our overseas move I did a lot of searching the Internet for blogs to follow of Americans living in Ireland and England. Some of those blogs have been pretty entertaining and informative. Many more of them were either sites left unattended with no recent posts or just dead links. On one hand I was surprised I found a bunch of active blogs. On the other hand  all the sites I came across referenced all the other sites highlighting how small of a community that was.

One thing I decided I did not want to do was change the name of my blog to some catchy phrase to note that I am an American and I’m in England. from all the blog reading I have done I know that’s the thing to do however I’m going to buck the trend.

I might still rename the site since Blog @ Scott.ac just isn’t that catchy. Since I no longer use my powerz.org domain name the old title of the site “Powerpedia” is no longer applicable. I did love that name however. Going to look for any previous posts over the last 14 years that explained powerz. I must’ve wrote about that if not I will need to. I’m thinking of a name something like Scott-o-Pedia? I am not sure. I’m open to ideas as long as they’re not catchy on American in London phrase of some sort.

For Those Who Actually Subscribe to this Blog…

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It turns out that I have people subscribed to this blog’s Feedburner Feed.  It was not many however more than I thought.  My challenge is I previously deleted most of my Google Accounts.  Turns out one of those was the account that controlled my Feedburner account.  Opps. I liked Feedburner because I could change domain names and still have the subscription feed be up to date.  Over the years I have changed his blog’s URL a bunch of times.  Surprisingly I would end up back to the original URL that I started with.  That is what I use today.

After 14 years and I keep coming back to the same site name and URL I figure I am not likely to change the URL to something else that is that much better.  I might try but I know deep down I should just give up and not try.  If I do that I do not need to maintain this feed that no longer represents the name of the site anyway.

If you do happen to use my RSS feed please update your feed to follow blog.scott.ac/feed.  The old feed “should” be telling you to redirect to the new one however I cannot test that since I am cashing the old content.  I will get around to testing later.  Thus this public service announcement about making the change if you do want to keep following me and you are not getting your updates from Facebook or Twitter.

The Story of Why I Make Short Blog Posts and Link Them to My Social Media Accounts

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In the summer of 2013 I made the decision to delete my Facebook profile. I wrote about it at the time here: I wanted to delete a large amount of content I had created and there was no way to do it without individually deleting things. I did not want to take the time or effort to do that so the only alternative I had was the so-called nuclear option of completely deleting my account. At the time I even thought I might not come back. I still think about getting rid of my account again however it is a good place to share photos and what’s going on with friends and family I don’t get to normally see. Communicating in other ways might be problematic so for now I keep my Facebook account.

The reason I wanted to delete all the content from the account in the first place was because when I initially signed up for my account somewhere in 2007 or 2008 my expectations of privacy were vastly different than what you are today. There wasn’t anything incriminating, illegal, or anything like that posted however with Facebook continuing to inch people to share more I was uneasy with a large amount of information that I hadn’t vetted since I published it was solely in their system. I didn’t like that so I removed it all. In the fall of 2014 I did the same thing with Google.

Those actions do not mean that I don’t publish personal things on the Internet. On the contrary anything I post nowadays I do so knowing full well that is public on the Internet. The only exception would be photos on Facebook that I post however I do it in such a way that I delete them after three months.

Some people including my wife have pointed out in may have made fun of the fact that I link very short status posts from my blog to Facebook. I do that for a specific reason. Normally I do not make status posts at all however there are times when the situation warrants it. My opinion might not have any bearing on anything however I would rather have something posted on my blog and crossposted to Facebook and/or Twitter then have it exclusively within the control of Facebook and their systems.

Now that I’ve started blogging more I post my writings to twitter and Facebook because that’s where the people I know go to browse. By sending the link instead of writing directly within Facebook their system only has the URL and may be a snippet from my blog. They don’t have all of the content. Like I said I don’t know if doing this has any bearing on anything however it’s my little way of controlling information I generate. I can control who spiders my blog and I can get analytics on who’s going to my blog whereas I have no idea what Facebook is doing with my data. Worse yet I have a bad idea about what they’re doing with it and it doesn’t have my best interests at heart. They’re not evil however there trying to make money for my information or information about me. That compels me to limit what information I provide to them. If you’ve actually read this far into the post and you feel that I might be getting my tinfoil hat out again I recommend you watch the 2013 documentary terms and conditions may apply. If you do you understand how disturbing and prevalent mining data about you really is.

So there you have it. You might think it’s silly however I feel I have very good reasons why most comments, status, updates I make on Twitter and Facebook are generated from my blog no matter how short it may be.

Blog Update

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I haven’t been updating this blog in a while. That is usually a sign of me not writing however  I have been doing a lot of off-line journaling as I mentioned in Dragon Anywhere. Some topics I would like to write about for this blog however I just haven’t had a chance to get to them. I do feel like I’ve gotten a handle on my journaling enough that I’m going to try to churn out a few topics that I’ve been meaning to write about. The first one is already scheduled to post tomorrow is a follow-up to something I wrote and backdated earlier this month.

It does feel like every few years I write a post like this about how I want to write more. I always do want to write more. Getting into the routine is always the hard part. Getting pretty close right now so stay tuned.

Deleting Facebook and Starting From Scratch

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If you are a Facebook friend of mine and are wondering why suddenly you got a invite to be my friend again and can’t find all my old content here’s why.

I have been pondering my use of Facebook for over a year. It started last year when I took the entire month of July off from using social media. I read in an article somewhere and thought it was a good idea. It turns out I did not miss it as much as I thought I would. Once that month was over I started using it again but on a more limited basis. Over the past year I keep reading about the things Facebook can do with my content or is doing with my content. I wasn’t pleased. The new search functionality just spooked me. It’s not like I posted anything questionable but I just don’t like some of the business practices they’re doing with the information I put in the system. When I first started using Facebook it was treated as a personal area to post things to my friends only. Over time they keep doing things in semi-sneaky ways to make your data more public. It just makes me uneasy. I tried to remove old content but after much searching online it became apparent that there is no easy way to bulk delete anything. Most forum posts suggest just deleting your entire account and starting over. I didn’t want to do that but in the end I felt there was no other feasible choice if I wanted old content removed.

Everything finally came to a head today when I deleted my old account. First I exported all the data from my old account and verified that I wasn’t using Facebook authentication on any sites that were critical to me. Then I just remove the account. Apparently it takes 14 days for account to actually be deleted and then another month or so for all the data to be removed from their systems. After deleting the original account I went on and created a new one. I spent time inviting friends from the old account to the new one. I will be honest in saying that I did not invite 100% of the frames on the old one to the new account. I took this change as an opportunity to remove people I really don’t talk to anymore. I seriously thought about not signing up for an account again but in the end I did for two reasons. First, a lot of family loves getting photos of Teagan via Facebook. The second reason is more practical. I like having Facebook because it does enable me to stay in contact with people I don’t always get to see but I had issues about security and what they do with my data so I will continue to use it or treat anything I put there like I do with twitter. When I first started posting I didn’t do that and that was what bothered me.

Longer term MC and I are talking about how and if we continue posting photos to Facebook.  We have read some articles about what people (or Facebook themselves for that matter) can do with the photos and Face recognition and EXIF data. I would like to find a way to use my Flickr account to link to my Facebook wall with no data remaining on Facebook systems.

The bottom line is if you’re a friend of mine please don’t be offended if I don’t “like” post of yours or do lots of commenting on things you post to your wall or mine. I am just not doing that at all or very often going forward.