Two steps forward…

And it was all going so well.

It’s been interesting over the last few weeks to read how concerned people are about putting their personal information on the internet. It’s a concern I understand, but particularly if you work in an Oxford (or other academic) library, there’s already information about you out there. Your name is already searchable, and there might even be a staff picture that’s accessible to anyone. For me, things like LinkedIn and Facebook are my chance to take back control of what’s out there, so that when people search for my name, the first information they find is the information I’ve put out there.

My concerns have more been around keeping my online identities separate. For some years, I’ve had an online profile that I use for most things, and while there’s nothing embarrassing/illegal attached to it, I do want to keep it separate from my professional life. When I set up this blog last year, I based it on that identity, but decided this morning it was time to do some cleaning up, and so I switched over to my personal/professional email address. Blogger was fairly helpful in doing this, but failed to warn me that I would end up ‘unfollowing’ all the blogs that I’d been following, which is less than ideal. Never mind, they’re all still in my Google Reader.

Which is the other thing I need to do now – divide up my RSS feeds and the people I follow on Twitter between the folk I want to follow professionally and the folk I want to follow personally. That’s quite important, especially if I’m going to give out blog/twitter/linkedin addresses to people. While I’m sure professional contacts won’t mind hearing how late my train is, I’m fairly sure they’re not interested in the random conversations I have with my friends about Doctor Who! I’m hoping it might also help me be more efficient, in that I won’t end up distracted by craft blogs when I’m trying to keep up with the library world. It’s a nice theory, but whether I can remember all the passwords for all the accounts remains to be seen!

For the indecisive among us…

I am officially the happiest blogger in blogland this morning, thanks to the new customisable templates from Blogger. One of the things I always said I didn’t like about Blogger was how I couldn’t make this place look how I wanted, and that my options were really, really limited. If I’m honest, I still find the dashboard very confusing to use, but being able to not just tweak but completely control how my blog appears is a huge step forwards. I had been planning to shut this place down once 23 Things was over, but this might just persuade me to stay.

For more details, head over to the Blogger in Draft blog here and follow the instructions. The only thing you can’t really do at the moment is upload your own photograph, but we’re promised that it’s coming.

Considering that when I was a student, I used to rearrange my furniture at least once a term, being able to rearrange my blog style is something that’s surprisingly important to me. Thank you, Blogger!