Ramblings, ideas, problems, and solutions

Category: Opinion

  • Facebook – unable to close comments

    Back in September of 2015, I commented that Facebook missed a feature to close comments. Then, in April, of 2016, I posted an article jubilating the fact that such a feature had been added. And so it had. For Pages. Not, however, for posts made to one’s personal timeline. Below, you can see how the…

  • Redundancy: a challenge and an opportunity

    Years ago, I faced one of the employed worker’s biggest fears; redundancy. The company I worked for needed to let a number of people go. Immediately after being informed of the state of affairs, I was further informed that my position was one of those evaluated for cut, and in the end, I was let…

  • Social media cause awareness done right

    As a counterpoint to last week’s post regarding vaguebooking and slacktivism, I wanted to take a look at another, more recent, social media cause awareness campaign, the #metoo campaign. If you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s one of the many explanations on it: If everyone who has been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote “Me Too” as…

  • On vaguebooking and slacktivism

    Note: This is a translated and re-worked version of a response I made to someone who was annoyed that someone else criticized  the posting of a heart without anything in the way of context to one’s facebook page, supposedly to “raise awareness about breast cancer”. The person made the claim that it had been going…

  • Patreon: Patronage for the internet age

    The practice of patronage – bestowing financial support on e.g. artists – is a time-honored tradition. In times gone by, patronage was both highly personal, and something reserved for the rich and very rich. One of the many things the internet has done, is to make such pursuits available to the crowds. My favorite example…

  • Something you might not know

    In an old blog post, I wrote about podcasting and the podcasts I subscribed to. Since then, the list has changed a fair bit; some podcasts have ended, or my interest in them has waned, and others have been added to the list. One of those latter ones is “Tell me something I don’t know“,…

  • Threatsaurus: a free resource to understand IT threats

    Depending on your perspective, threats against IT systems are either extremely rare, something that happens to other people, or a daily (or near-daily) occurrence. The former is generally from the perspective of the end user, whereas the latter will be the perspective of IT professionals. One of the challenges I’ve encountered in talking to end…

  • HTTPS enabled, now forced

    Sometime in late 2016, I enabled HTTPS on the site, to make sure that this option was available to those who wanted to use it. I didn’t really think much of it, but was planning on moving to enforce usage at some point. Then came this post from Troy Hunt, where I learned that a…

  • Facebook Groups: Asking prospective members questions

    In last week’s post repeating my view on Facebook Groups, I didn’t mention a fairly new tool that group admins have; an option to ask up to three questions to prospective members. It’s found under Manage Groups -> Edit Group Settings, and the option looks as follows: When you click “Ask questions”, you get this…

  • The biggest problem with Facebook groups

    As I’ve alluded to previously, I administer a few Facebook groups. Groups are one of my favorite Facebook features, and they are useful to communicate with a subset of Facebook users without necessarily having to be friends with them. There’s one problem with groups, however; anyone can add anyone to a group, without their say…

  • State of the Blog 2017

    As I did last year, I am writing a retrospective article for the summer. These are meant to be the summer counterpart to my end-of-year roundup series, which means that some information will be duplicated across the two series of posts. Blogging has continued to be an outlet for me. At most, I have had ten weeks’ worth…