All in The Name of Laziness...

At the risk of sounding megalomaniacal, this evening I started a Facebook page expressly for this blog.  I didn't mean to, it just sort of happened...and while on vacation, at that!  Facebook made some changes over the past few months about how a "Group" or "Fan Page" is used and managed...in addition, RSS feeds into my own personal page have fallen apart earlier this month.  I used to have automatic Facebook profile notifications when I'd post to Picasaweb, You Tube and Blogger.  None of it happens automatically anymore...

"Oh no, Major Mom has to do work?  Stop the world!"

What motivated me to do it this weekend?  I tossed out a couple of quick posts over the weekend about Dave's Father's Day ode on GeekMom and his feature article in N-Scale Magazine.  For some reason, the Twitter connection that posts new blog posts straight to Facebook (in the form of a shortened URL like this one) automatically decided to send the same post every hour for 4 hours to Twitter...and therefore to Facebook.

I didn't mean to be so spammy, really, I didn't!

Therefore, because I was hit with a double whammy of (a) no more Blogger post imports and (b) multiple notifications of the same blog post from Twitter, I set up a page that expressly imports my blog posts, and the only people who will see those blog posts on Facebook now are those who "Like" the page.  If you are on Facebook, you should be able to see the tag on the right hand side inviting you to "Like" the page (if you haven't already).  If you aren't on Facebook, then I guess all you see is a Facebook.com logo.

In addition, I added a "Tweet This" type of widget to each of the posts.  It's right before the first words of the post.  If you like what you read, then if you have a Twitter account, you can share it via Twitter.  Go ahead, Tweet it!

I've been realizing that Facebook and Twitter, being the microblogs they are, doesn't have a user-friendly archive capability.  Try paging back in time on your profile page and see how far back you can go...it'll go back a ways, but in my case you only see about 2-3 days worth of posts at a time.  You have to click "Older Posts" over...and over...and over...and over....

Compare that to this blog, where you can easily search posts by year, by month, by label topic, or a generic keyword search.  You can page back all the way to the beginning quite easily.

PS: I'm also writing this to test how quickly it'll import to Facebook.  I get the feeling it still isn't quick...