So I’m probably going to keep my blog at WordPress and just add some more pages to it because it doesn’t seem worth the complications of leaving a dead blog here and trying to get people to read at my new location etc.

Apart from that, I had reason to edit my Facebook relationship status recently and noticed something missing – the options are:

• Single
• In a relationship
• Engaged
• Married
• It’s complicated and
• In an open relationship.

So I have a couple of friends who are married AND in an open relationship. So they’re now forced to choose whether to represent themselves online as married OR as in an open relationship, whereas offline they are both. The couple I’m thinking of have decided to put ‘In an open relationship’ as it happens. But I wondered if this caused them any dilemma or if they had an issue with that.

Facebook probably thought they were being quite liberal by even offering the open relationship option, but maybe a blank text box would be better, so people could define their relationship however they chose to.

The only problem with that would be for the purposes of searching for people with a specific relationship setting, because there would be so much variety in the way people described their relationships. But why would anyone search for people based on their relationship setting? Apart from if they were trying to search for someone to date and wanted to search for ‘single’ people, but why would anyone ever want to do a search for married people for example? Or people in a relationship?

The other thing is – what about people in poly relationships? What if someone had a 3-way (or more) relationship and wanted to express that on their profile?

So I just copied my blog over to bethgranter.com/blog/ just to see if I could, and so I could have a go at using WordPress for a CMS so I know how to do it for clients.  It was pretty successful and now I’ll be able to edit the CSS to my liking, although I do rather like the Unsleepable theme as it stands.  Anyway, the biggest hassle has been moving across all my widgets and I still haven’t finished doing that.  Other than that, very nice and easy.  I’ve even set up a bunch of pages to hold all the information I did have on my standalone site, e.g. the content from bethgranter.com/illustration is now a page under bethgranter.com/blog (I realise I could have done this here too).  So now I have a couple of dilemmas.  This blog as it stands has quite good Google ranking and about 25 readers a day.  What do I do now?  Should I post something here that says there won’t be any more posts and just tell everyone to go over to my bethgranter.com site for new content?  Or forget my new URL and leave my content as it is, hosted by WordPress?  And what about old posts here?  They are linked to from all over the place so I don’t want to delete them.  But should I turn off comments so i don’t end up with lots of new comments on this blog and other new comments on the bethgranter.com one?  I am confused.

A post about work…

Last week I presented my design for the University of Sussex’s social networking community mashup site to pilot groups. We did it in the InQbate (creativity) centre, which has lots of projectors and space for running around in. It was much more fun than sending out a questionnaire and a link to a site.
Here’s a link to the project blog: http://splashproject.blogspot.com

And here’s the video of the event:

On Virb.com today, this made me laugh:

I like their tone. I hope I’m organised. This was on the page where you accept friend requests. I was there because I was declining a friend request from a band I didn’t like. Maybe the above message should only come up if you’ve gone to that page without having any friend requests in the first place, not as the thing you’re faced with immediately after refusing a friend request. Maybe something about me being picky would be better in that situation.