Andy Jaeger

What with Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, Last.fm, Spotify and this blog, I’ve got quite a lot going on online. I hadn’t recognised until today quite how stressful that was, mostly because of the links and interdependencies between all of those channels, constantly feeding each other. I’m not any less in love with being online than I was, I just realised that I needed to pull back and rationalise, if only to make it a little bit easier to manage.

So, I’ve uncoupled Facebook and Twitter. Partly this is because my use of Facebook is changing, becoming less about broadcasting news and more about keeping in touch. Consequently, having Twitter post every update to my Facebook wall was annoying to me, and annoying to my friends, especially though who object to @twitter #punctuation.

I’ve also slimmed down and simplified the theme I was using for this blog. Having let my blog languish for a while, I’d given it a lick of paint with the quite beautiful The Morning After magazine-style theme, which I loved, and still love. The only problem is that it is difficult to keep updated, partly because of the hassle of featured posts, special icons and multiple categories. All a bit difficult to manage, especially if you want to blog on the fly, which I often do. I realised that overcomplicating the delivery mechanism had actually stopped me doing any writing, because it was all to complex.

This new BlogTheme, also via the fantastic Woo Themes, is easy to use and well designed. I’ll make a couple of tweaks when I get round to it – like the fact that the logo top right isn’t a clickable link back to the homepage – but it will do more than adequately for now.