Week 8: Social Media

Personally, I don't like the idea of incorporating social media into blogs. I can definitely see why experienced/professional bloggers would want to bridge the two together, but I view it as an unnecessary risk due to the privacy concerns involved. Someone who makes a living by blogging or is just a heavy-user of blogging platforms would probably be very interested in tying their social media profile(s) to the blog(s). By doing so, they could potentially stir up some additional interest in their blog and grow their audience significantly. Also, it could work the other way and expand their following for their social media profile(s).

Like I said, in my eyes, it's an unnecessary risk to take. There are so many loopholes and "backdoors" to the security/privacy measures that are put in place by social media platforms. In addition to that, countless users of social media platforms don't even bother to read the privacy/end-user licence agreements and blindly accept the terms. This is a deadly combination because they have no idea what they are truly getting themselves into. Some might view my take on this subject as a bit paranoid, but I simply classify it as being aware. I attribute my awareness to my professional life; which largely deals with cyber-security, mobile device security, and virtual infrastructure.

Week 7: RSS

RSS (Rich Site Summary) feeds can be quite useful. They allow you to view new content (usually news) from websites in a concise/efficient manner; all without having to visit the site itself. Admittedly, I've never really gotten into using them for myself; although I have helped some co-workers set them up before. Personally, I don't get too much benefit out of them. I typically prefer to visit the website directly and find the content I'm looking for.

In my opinion, my web-searching skills are good enough that I don't need the assistance of RSS feeds to find the latest items of interest on websites. Also, when viewing the entire website, after I find the content I was looking for, I am able to branch out and view the plethora of other content that the site has to offer. That being said, I did include three RSS feeds in this blog for the sake of the class. One dealing with technology news (TomsHardware), one dealing with worldwide news (BBC News), and one dealing with sports news (NPR Sports). Who knows, maybe I'll start to use RSS feeds more often now...

Welcome to my blog!

For this class, I decided to go with Blogger to create my own personal blog. The reason I did so was because after researching the three options, it appeared to me as if Blogger was the most customizable. Sure it trades off some ease-of-access features like Weebly’s drag-and-drop in order to achieve that level of customization, but I felt that the added functionality was more important. Also, the storage offered by a free Blogger account can almost be thought of as limitless. This is because any picture under 2048x2048 pixels is not taken into consideration for the storage limit imposed on users.