Tag: blogging

It’s Been A While

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I’m as guilty as the next person.  I mean to post in a blog regularly and I do for a short time, and then it gets neglected.

Whats been occurring?

A few months ago, I had the opportunity  to buy a secondhand iPad Mini 2 for a good price so I did. It’s been a real useful addition too. I like the size; quite frankly my Samsung Galaxy NotePro 12.2 is too big to chuck in a car at pocket and carry around everywhere.

Then the PC died. I’d been running Windows 10 Technical Preview on it for the best part of a year, and it was certainly better than Windows 8, but it was still prone to annoying slowdowns and lock ups.

AppleI decided to go for a Mac instead. My current budget wouldn’t stretch to a Mac Pro, and as I already had a decent  Logitech wireless keyboard and mouse and a widescreen monitor only a few months old, a Mac Mini fitted the bill just right.

As I had my data on external drives and in the cloud, set up was a doddle, and I was up and running in no time.  Of course, when you’re running software, the Operating System should really just be there in the background taking care of everything and OS X does just that. None of those hang ups or slowdowns either. I’m happy with the switch, and perhaps a new iPhone might logically complete this change to a new ecosystem.

I’ve actually been writing this post on my iPad Mini. I’d be the first to say I’d rather be using a full size keyboard, but the experience hasn’t been too bad. Better than blogging anything more than a couple of sentences from a smartphone!

 

 

 

Automatic Cross-Posting

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It’s great that you can post to one one place, and have it automatically reposted to other places. A photograph taken in Instagram, can appear on your Facebook page; your blog posts can arrive on your Google+ page in seconds, and your Tumblr can Tweet.

Typing with my tablet
Sitting in Starbucks

However, it’s very easy to overdo it.

Be sure to check for duplicates, because it’s easy to set up a loop. Perhaps you set those Instagram posts to go to Facebook and Tumblr and Twitter, but you’ve got your Tumblr to tweet, and your tweets go to Facebook too. Now, you’ve got the same post arriving on your Facebook twice and tweeting twice.

While your friends might well like your photographic efforts they’re probably not such a huge fan that they want to see them numerous times!

Services like IFTTT are great for automating some of these things, but again it’s very easy to set up dupe loops. WordPress can easily repost to various social media sites for you, but be careful where it’s already switched on elsewhere!

There can be too much of a good thing.