I’ve been completely hooked by blogging but I’ve never felt the urge to create a Facebook page and, although I have a Twitter account, the only thing that is tweeted, automatically, is a new post here.
As far as Facebook is concerned, I have a strong aversion to it – born of my wife’s announcements like “?? says she’s sitting in ?? celebrity restaurant drinking her seventh vodka and ?? (celebrity chef) has just spoken to her” and then shows me a picture of said ?? obviously very drunk in said restaurant. Who cares?
However, for promoting an organisation it’s a different matter so, having recently created a blog for a particular activity of the small charity for which I work, I’ve gone the whole hog and also created a Facebook page and a Twitter account for it. Now I’m getting out a flyer promoting the three communications media to all local libraries, community centres, etc.
The blog is very simple, it is just a weekly update of the activities in our specialised community centre, catering for people with sight loss and additional disabilities, posted every Monday as a reminder for the activities during the following week.
The Facebook page is used to post very short reports of activities with one or two photographs.
As for Twitter, I’ve now got participants in the courses and other activities doing live tweets during the sessions.
There have been some very interesting and helpful posts from WordPress in the past couple of weeks; I was particularly taken by one describing how a magazine, Beatroute, had used the Oxygen theme to make a ‘blog’ version of the magazine.
I’ve been pondering for some time how to distribute ‘electronically’ the quarterly newsletter I produce for the charity for which I work. Sending PDFs isn’t really satisfactory. The ‘blog’ magazine seems the ideal solution though it will be a lot more work than just turning my newsletter InDesign files into PDFs.
It’s worth mentioning that the text here is not in the typeface which is default for the theme. The default text is a seriffed typeface – like this
typeface
– which can be very difficult for people with sight loss to read. I also bumped the size up a bit and immediately got some ‘thanks’ messages from people who would not be considered to have a ‘visual impairment’.
However, ‘electronic’ communication is often much better for people with sight loss as the computer and other devices can make things much easier, including of course speaking a text. Apple have excelled in this.
February 5, 2013 at 11:50 pm
This post did not appear in my reader, which is bizarre and annoying! I don’t like Facebook much, but it has worthwhile purposes like yours – it will be fundamental to providing more info and therefore access for your audience. I mainly use it to find news, information but don’t get involved in the chat -I reserve that for subjects I am interested in – which I where blogging comes in. Thanks for the useful reminder about typefaces too!
February 6, 2013 at 7:13 am
A quick reply before off to York for my 2 day a week job. Some weird things do happen on WordPress: this morning I got an email notification of a comment I made on a blog I follow from my photo blog; I made the comment before Christmas! And although I changed the email address linked to this blog some months ago because my ‘personal’ email was getting overwhelmed, now and then a notification of a ‘like’ or ‘comment’ goes to the personal address, for no good reason I can see. Finally (I hope), sometimes when I do a gallery post with a lot of pictures, like the one yesterday, all the pictures appear in the ‘slide show’ but they don’t all appear in the ‘mosaic’ on the page.
February 3, 2013 at 9:25 am
Thanks Eddy. I so much appreciate your comments. I don’t know whether you can change the text type in all themes, without paying for the ‘custom’ upgrade, but I would think so. It helps to know a little html, which I guess you do with the IT background, but it isn’t necessary. Unfortunately, because the headline font is embedded in the CSS that can’t be changed, or I haven’t found a way to do it.
February 2, 2013 at 4:42 pm
And I was wondering why I enjoyed reading your blog; it’s because I can read it 🙂
Great use of WordPress and a very worthy cause, good luck.