Month: March 2015

The future and how we get there

I’ve spent a fair bit of this weekend reading through my notes from the conference I’ve just been at, and picking out some key concepts and quotes for a presentation I appear to be writing called “The future and how we get there”.

It’s mostly about new technology, and how we can use it to become more productive and make our lives more efficient. But I suppose it’s also a little about how the way people learn is changing, and how the bottleneck preventing instantaneous acquisition and processing of information has moved from the computers we use to…well…us.

It’s also about how we should be judged on output and not ideas, and how the theoretical only becomes powerful when it becomes actual.

Speaking of which, I’ve spent an hour or so this evening testing my theories about how easy it is to move a complicated WordPress installation with 9 years of content to a brand new WordPress installation on a different server.

See https://andyferguson.wordpress.com/ for what should be an identical clone of this blog (apart from this post, obviously). I’m not quite sure if this is me testing the water for a move to a hosted site, or if I’m just using this as a testbed for other projects, but it was an interesting experiment to run, and as I had a very recent backup (from this morning) it was also a good way to test my backup plan at the same time.

Technology is great when it works. And even when it doesn’t work it’s usually a learning experience.

Social media notifications

I thought it might be useful to mention that I turned off all email notifications on social media sites a few months ago. I do still get banner notifications on my phone, but I found myself ignoring the emails on the whole, and thought I’d remove a bit of noise from my inbox. I still regard myself as active on (in this order) Twitter, G+, Facebook and LinkedIn, but I also still very much regard email as my primary method of contact for anything urgent/important, be it personal or professional.

I suppose it’s also useful to mention that I’ve started scheduling a few posts, both to my blog and to my social networks. I very much try and keep content relevant to my (perceived) audience, but if you do see me posting things when you know I’m at work or in a meeting with you, then scheduling is probably the answer (I use Buffer for scheduling, and may write more about this soon).