I’ve deleted, or deactivated, my FaceBook account. I know there has been a lot of Internet buzz recently about changes that FaceBook has made to its privacy agreement, but that really has no bearing on my reasons for deactivating. It just no longer interests me.

I believe that FaceBook has become the AOL or MySpace of the Internet. There is a lot of uninteresting junk, too much traffic, and I’m not interested spending mental bandwidth keeping up with it.

I have this BLOG space for sharing opinions, a personal web site, my board gaming BLOG for other hobbies, my Squeak Enhancements site for sharing specific technical stuff, and I still use Flickr for photos.

My preferred way of communicating daily status and thoughts is to utilize the micro-blogging tool Twitter. With Twitter I feel more connected with what I need to know and easily share with others.

I switched my BLOG to using WordPress in October last year.

And I just realized how glad I am about it.

First off, the system is very easy to use.

Second, I think the themes and editing you can do to tailor a theme, make really good looking web sites. I’m quite happy with how mine has turned out.

Third, it’s very stable and easy to manage. There have been regular updates to the base software as well as plugins. Updating is very easy to do.

Fourth, there’s an iPhone app that makes it possible for me to easily create new entries directly from my iPhone. Very cool.

What triggered this post for me was that I just did an upgrade to 2.8.2. I was watching the upgrade install itself and realized how I had become so accustomed to the reliable easy to care-for nature of this Blogging software.

Quite a while ago I worked as a developer for a firm that employed about 1000 software analysts and developers. The company had a rich suite of software to offer and was operating a successful business. It was also true that, as a technical staff member, you regularly saw evidence that the folks several pay grades higher up the company ladder had no longer any reasonable understanding of how software was written. Make no mistake, this was a software company. It often felt like we were being operated by people who only understood finance. Or maybe manufacturing.

In a company of that size, and because of the deep technical nature of the products we were developing, it was common to work side-by-side with some of the brightest people in the software industry. Critical thinking and analysis skills were strong amongst the developers.

As happens in modern times, the senior executives were often “changed out”. I remember particularly how disconnected the CEO was from where the real work happened – within the development organization. We were facing some difficult times and the company was looking for ways to cut costs and do what it could to improve productivity. As is common in very large developer organizations like theirs was, the processes often got in the way of the work. And the backlog of defects was measured in the thousands.

So late one day the newest CEO had called together a meeting with all the developers for a “pep talk”. Morale was pretty bad already. We were gathered in the main entry foyer of the building where he had a podium set up with audio equipment for proper communication. It was a Friday afternoon, around 4:00 PM as I recall. Mind you, many of the developers I knew were “early birds” and came into work at 6:00. So they were already staying after hours on a Friday for this meeting.

I’ll never forget his attempt at getting the troops to pep-up morale and help pick up the overall productivity within the company. He did come from a manufacturing company before he became the CEO. For many developers, it just drove home a wholly different point.

He actually ended up his presentation by asking each developer to do their part to improve productivity by “writing one extra line of code every day.”

I remembered the old Refactoring approach where I was happy if I deleted lines of code everyday.

Spent some time today helping an old friend setup his WordPress software and the corresponding iPhone application (for posting to WordPress while mobile).

That was fun. Once he sends me a link to the finished site I’ll add it to my Blog Roll.

I think I have the RSS feeds issue resolved with the Blog.  Just a dumb configuration error on my part.  I forgot to turn it on.

Blaine and I were looking at my Blog site and noticed that he was no longer getting any entries from my feed.

It seems that when I switched to the using WordPress, hosting by my web host Lunar Pages, something didn’t get setup correctly.

Not sure what’s wrong just yet.  Ideas are welcomed.

Well, I’ve thinking about it for a while now and here it is. I’ve replaced iBlog software for writing and started using Word Press, hosted from Lunar Pages (my web host), and I can now post text and pictures directly from my iPhone.

Sweet.

I also customized the theme I’m using by changing the graphic on the main page. I used Gimp and added in an image of the Smallktalk balloon on the TV screen. That was fun and it adds a little personal touch.

First test post from iPhone.