Now, just recently I’ve not been all that active on Twitter or Facebook.  Life has just been too hectic, and having spent all day working at a computer actually the last thing on my mind when I get home is “right, I really need to sit in front of a computer for the rest of the evening”.  I’ve also had very little to say for myself, so even when I do find myself sat at a computer in the evening, I can rarely think of anything worthwhile to say.  The same goes for this blog, which hasn’t really been regularly updated in yonks.

A few days ago I was chatting to two of my best friends on Skype, catching up on stuff.  It was wonderful to see them both, and it reminded me just how much I miss them, and how irritating it is that Colchester is just so far away.  Whoever decided that 200 miles needed to be such a long distance clearly needs their head examined.  In fact, it occurred to me that Anne-Marie and Sarah are still my closest friends (apart from Ellie of course), despite the distance and the shameful lack of regular conversation.  We really ought to keep in touch more often.

And then it hit me – I’ve been doing Twitter all wrong.

For some time now I’ve been operating under the mantra that “no one wants to hear about what you had for breakfast”.  It’s been drilled into me that Twitter is meant for sharing important and useful information, and that you have to offer something unique and intellectually valuable for people to follow you and retweet your ideas.  Well, if the goal of your existence on Twitter is to attract clients and do business and generally be seen on Twitter as a minor celebrity, then yes, by all means, that’s exactly what you should do.  But that’s not me any more.  The only people interested in following me now are my friends and family.  I’m not interested in anyone else.  And I don’t have to prove my intelligence to my friends, they already know my foolishness, they don’t want to hear about the latest trends in website performance or PHP coding.  My Twitter followers are like Anne-Marie and Sarah, who want to hear about those mundane everyday moments that often get missed even in a Skype video call.  True, they may still not care what I had for breakfast, but there are other parts of my life that they will be interested in.

I’ve found my purpose again.  And hopefully, with that newfound confidence in my own online existence, you should hear more from me in future.  And if not, feel free to shout at me in the comments to tell me off.

On that note, I was mildly amused (and at the same time mildly annoyed) by a couple of friends giving a running commentary on Twitter as the most recent England match was being played.  I wondered who exactly those tweets were for the benefit of.  If I had actually been interested in the football, I would have been watching, and wouldn’t have needed the commentary.  As it is, I chose not to watch the football, because I’m not interested.  So you give me a running commentary anyway.  Is there no escape??

As it happens, my natural tendency to shun all popular sports stems from years of denial, conscious and sub-conscious decisions not to follow the crowd, and embarrassment.

To explain, let me share with you a particularly memorable incident at primary school.  I think it was year 5, or thereabouts. Back then the Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles were in full swing, and everyone had the action figures.  Everyone except me.  I pestered my mum endlessly to get me one, and eventually she relented and bought me the orange one, whatever he was called.  Actually, she bought two, one for me and one for my younger brother, so that we didn’t fight over them (I think he got the red one).  It was such am amazing feeling of justification and self-worth, and I proudly took my Turtle into school the next day.

That day, Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles went out of fashion.  No one had them but me.  No one was interested in my new toy.  After all that fuss, it was essentially worthless, both in monetary terms and also (arguably more importantly) in terms of what would then have been called “street cred”.  I wasn’t cool for having a Turtle.  I was “gay” for having such a childish toy that everyone else had grown out of.  I must stress that it wasn’t as if months or years had passed – the day before they had been all the rage.

My pride deflated, I resolved never again to be a sheep, never again to follow the crowd, never again to do or have anything at all that was ‘popular’.  If it was truly special, it would last long enough for me to be able to get one the following year when the hype had died down.  In all honesty I still have that opinion when it comes to technology, but that’s another story.

So, back to sport.  You see, I wasn’t actually particularly terrible at football.  True, I wasn’t the best, because I didn’t really have a passion for it as a sport, but I was small and light and nimble and could very easily weave in and out of other people to get to the ball.  I played at Boys’ Brigade quite frequently, in fact.  But I made a point of hating it, out of principle.  If it was something everyone else enjoyed, I’d enjoy something else.  The other boys liked to play football, but I liked unihoc.  Just to spite them.

In secondary school, I got in with a crowd of other misfits (apologies to any of those friends of mine who are reading this and never saw themselves as a misfit).  We were clever without being outstanding boffins.  We were mildly naughty at times without being out-right rebels.  We were immature without getting into trouble.  We were a team of friends without actually being popular.  And when it came to P.E. and games, on the whole we were totally unsuited for physical activity.  If we could have got out of playing rugby in the freezing cold, we would have done.  If we could stand by the sides of the pitch and avoid the football completely, it was a good day.  In cricket, fielding was much more favourable than batting because you got to stand around and not run.  As a group, we were all like-minded in our resistance to popular culture.

And then, one day when we were running our weekly cross country route, a revelation hit me.  I had become a sheep again, this time for the other side.  All my friends expected me to be just as unenthused by sport as they were.  They expected me to be rubbish at football.  They expected me to stay with them at the back of the cross country pack, walking wherever we could get away with it, claiming to be critically unfit.  The trouble was, I cycled to school every day, I had good strong leg muscles and a fair dose of stamina.  So I left my friends behind, ran a bit faster, a bit harder.  I ran until I was out of breath, and then carried on some more.  I ran until my legs shouted for mercy, and then ran some more.  I ran until my throat was dry, until my breathing was painful and wheezy, until the sweat poured from my face, until my vision was blurred by dehydration, and then ran some more.  I got a personal best that week.  And the following week I did even better, because I ran like that right from the start.  It was my act of defiance, spitting in the face of the new popular culture I had become a part of, rejecting the expectation of lethargy, and stepping out on my own for once.  Turns out I was pretty good at physical exertion after all.

So when it comes to the World Cup, or the tennis for that matter, part of me refuses to take any interest solely because everyone else is.  It’s not so much that I don’t like football, it’s more that I don’t like that everyone likes it.  If it fell from popularity, I might be more inclined to take an interest.  I think that’s unlikely, somehow.  I would much rather watch the World Rally Championship than the Formula One.  I would much rather watch a short documentary on opera singers than watch The X-Factor.  I would much rather watch videos of people doing clever stuff on YouTube than watch Britain’s Got Talent.  I would much rather sit and look out the window at the beautiful countryside than watch the World Cup.

But here’s the rub – am I falling into the same trap as when I was at secondary school?  Am I following a different crowd now, of people who don’t like football out of principle, without considering whether I do actually like it?  And can I be true to myself and recognise my own genuine interests without then putting myself into another box with another bunch of people?  It is a pickle.

Maybe I should just take up knitting.

In any case, it’s taken me until last night to resolve the matter.  I had previously tried copying new files across to upgrade to the latest version, but that didn’t work.  So last night I took a full backup of everything, deleted all the core files from the server, and uploaded a fresh load of files.  And as if by some deep and powerful magic, my command over my online presence was finally restored.  With that liberation still fresh, I jumped on the opportunity to make a few changes.

The most obvious change you’ll see is that I’m now importing my Twitter feed.  When I post a new tweet, it’ll get displayed here on my blog too, appearing like a little speech bubble.  This is actually a category in WordPress too, so I can non-Twitter mini-posts too.  Like for those times when I really feel the need to say something to the world, but Twitter doesn’t give me enough characters, and a full-on multi-paragraph post isn’t necessary.  Of course, I understand that you may not want my Twittering to come up in your RSS reader, so if you want to continue reading my blog by RSS but excluding these micro-posts you can now use this new RSS feed URL: www.minipix.co.uk/?feed=rss2&cat=-342.

Other changes I’m bringing in include a mobile-enabled view of my blog, so that you can read my posts from your phone.  I’ll hopefully also figure out a way of updating my blog from my mobile too, so that I can blog on the move.

I shall also be adding a new ‘Family’ category, as I seem to be writing an increasing amount about our son Samuel, and it feels appropriate to recognise his significance with his own category.

EDIT: If you’re seeing the Twitter micro-posts but they’re unformatted (i.e. not in funky speech bubbles) you probably need to refresh your browser to reload the stylesheet.  To refresh your browser, click the refresh button in the toolbar.  Or press F5.  Or press CTRL-R.  Or CMD-R if you’re on a Mac.  Or ALT-CTRL-SHIFT-TAB-R-X-N-SPACE if you happen to have that set up as a custom keyboard shortcut.

I use my blog to tell people what I’ve been doing recently.  My readers are usually friends and family, unless a passer-by happens to stumble across something via Google that interests them.  My posts are generally about things I’m interested in, things I’ve done, things I meant to do but didn’t, or things that I want to rant about.

But now I’ve fallen in love with Twitter, my Twhirl client always running on my desktop, ready to accept my latest status update as and when I feel led to bend the world’s ear with my 140 characters of insight.  No logging in, no pressure to write unnecessary paragraphs of fluff, just a short blast of information.  No time like the present.  The result is that I feel like I’ve told the world what’s going on, despite the noticeable absence on my blog.  So I apologise that I’ve not posted more here in recent weeks.  Blame Twitter for being so darn addictive.

In fact, so addictive and successful is Twitter that I have all but forgotten the existence of Facebook.  Remember Facebook?  I used to use it to find all my friends and keep in touch with what they were doing.  But once all my friends were found it sort of lost its attraction.  I logged in occasionally to check the news feed to find out what people’s latest status updates were, and that was about it.  Don’t even try persuading me to take interest in an application, I have absolutely no desire to clutter my life with anything else.  Once I started using Twitter I realised that the status bit was all I was using Facebook for, and Twitter was just better at doing that.  So I suppose another apology is required for Facebook aficionados.  No time like the present.

So, an update, then.  Yesterday (which was Sunday) Ellie and I went to church.  Four times.  We went to the 9:25am service, which is the more traditional one, where we sang surprisingly few carols given it was the second Sunday of Advent and the first Sunday in December.  Then we hung around for the 11am service, which is a more contemporary and informal service, a bit like the old Chaplaincy services of yore.  While we were there they were advertising the Meditation service that was happening at 5pm, and we thought “why not”.  No time like the present.  So after lunch and an hour or two that I remember very little about, we headed out to church again.  The meditation was candle-lit, and was actually quite useful in getting my head focused on God again and taking Christmas seriously.  Then, after a few cakes and refreshments we headed over to the Salvation Army for The Gathering, which is an ecumenical Churches Together service with some singing and prayer, where we ate more cake.

And now we’re waiting.  Still waiting.  Our baby is officially due today, Monday 7th December, but I don’t think anyone’s told the baby.  We keep trying to persuade it that it’s much nicer out here, that it’ll have more room to move, that there’s more to see, and that there’s no time like the present, but so far there’s no indication of anything happening.  In all honesty we’re both getting a bit bored of all this waiting.  They say you should cherish each moment, because you’ll never get those ‘just the two of us’ moments again.  But then they said that about a lot of other things too, and we don’t believe them.  We want a baby.  We ordered it, we were told the delivery date, and it hasn’t come yet.  Maybe we should contact DHL and see if they have a tracking code for it…

Oh, and our house is all Christmassy.  We were thinking about it last week, and that with the baby due any day now we ought to get the decorations up sooner rather than later, otherwise they may never be put up at all.  No time like the present, after all.  So I dug out all our decorations from the garage, and we decorated the tree.  Trouble is, our house has grown.  That is to say, this house is significantly bigger than our previous house, and our decorations don’t go as far any more.  So on Saturday we went to Tesco to find some more.  We were very disappointed at their range of decorations, truth be told, and came away with very little.  So in the afternoon we went to Dobbies Garden World to see what their Christmas range was.  They had a huge range of stuff, but it was all rather expensive and arty, and we didn’t pick up much their either.  Turns out we have a much cheaper, tackier approach to decorations, and neither of those shops catered to people like us.  We managed to find some cheap tinsel in Focus though, and our house is now a lot more Christmassy than it was.  And in years to come I’m sure it’ll be even more heaving, what with paper chains and home-made decorations and suchlike.

That’s all from me for now.  Things to do.  No time like the present, so I’m told.

This is a useful Twitter widget - repeats everything everyone else has said.

I’ve never been one for associating with the ‘in crowd’.  I’ve never been particularly interested in trends, fashions, fads or crazes.  Well, I say never… I do remember a time when I was at primary school when Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle action figures were the big thing, and I saw everyone else playing with them, and I pestered my Mum to buy me one, and she did, and the day I brought mine into school was the day they went out of fashion.  It’s scarred me for life.  Not that I’m bitter.

Fast forward a decade or so and I’m still in a similar mindset, though it has evolved slightly.  My approach now is to observe the trend from a distance, and then when it’s established itself and the hype has died down, then I jump on the bandwagon, and hope to goodness that I haven’t left it too late.  As a result, I have never bought a brand new Mac, I still haven’t got an iPhone, I joined Facebook to find most of my friends already there, and I gave SecondLife a spin a year or so too late.  And now it’s happened again.  I’m on Twitter.

Now, before you all shoot me down for giving in (or praise me for joining the enlightened, depending on which side of the fence you’ve set up camp), let me explain why.

The way I see it, Twitter is basically the ‘status’ bit of Facebook, on its own.  You type in what you’re doing, and if people are interested they’ll read it.  Or, to be more precise, if you write something interesting and people are interested they’ll read it.

To be a tweeter, you need to have spare time in which to write your tweets, and need to have enough going on around you to have something worthwhile to tweet about.  To be a tweet reader, you need to have time to read through everyone else’s tweets, managing who you’re ‘following’ so that you don’t get tweets you’re not in the least interested in, and if you have even more spare time you can reply to tweets with your own.  For the average person, there are not enough hours in the day.  At least there shouldn’t be.  For the average computer geek, there are not enough topics to tweet about because most of it is already covered in your blog.

My primary reason for joining the ranks of Tweeters is business.  I’ve spent a fair amount of time the last few days concentrating on SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) on my ChapterNine web site.  The aim of this is to make my site appear higher in search results, to increase the likelihood of people finding me and asking me to do their web site.  SEO is a complicated and mysterious art, with no absolute answers and no magic combination, which is undoubtedly why so many SEO companies charge so much for their services.  Of course, site ranking is only half the battle – for people to find you, most often they need first to be looking for you.  And that’s where social networking comes in.  Hence Twitter.

What I’ll be doing with my Twitter account is updating it regularly with what I’m doing at work, whether that’s researching new technology, designing, coding, announcing that a site has just gone live, reviewing something, or just replying to e-mails.  By mentioning my business it gets the name ‘out there’ in the community.  By reviewing other people’s products it means they might ‘follow’ my Twitter account to see what else I say.  Basically, it’s all about publicity.  The more I say, the more has been said, which can only be a good thing.  It’s not necessarily going to make a huge difference in SEO terms, but it’ll probably help a little, and even that is not to be sniffed at.