Paul Jacobson

A few updates from my side

I updated this post on 2014-10-28. I since merged my blog and my portfolio site and moved the combined site to this domain. It works out better that way, I think.

The last few months have been pretty crazy. We have some big changes ahead of us but, for now, I thought I’d share a couple updates. One big piece of new (for me at least) is my new photography project which I have called “Creative Opportunities“. It has its own website and I’ve been sharing some of the work I am excited about there.

You may have noticed that I published a portfolio site a while ago which I unimaginatively called “Paul Jacobson Info”. There are so many 3rd party services you can use to publish a profile or portfolio website and, rather than using yet another service I don’t really have all that much control over, I’d create a site of my own. I just updatedintegrated that site into this one with a better theme and more information about my three main work focus areas, namely law and digital risk; writing and thinking as well as my photography.

I’ve also been thinking more about my plan for 2014, to simplify my life as much as I can. Well, my life is anything but simple at the moment but one aspect I’m thinking about again is the plethora of services and apps I use.

My OCD tendencies don’t gel too well with too many overlapping services that require more effort to maintain them than to use meaningfully. I love using so many of these services but I wonder if my life wouldn’t be that much less stressful if I just picked and committed to a couple essential options. This isn’t exactly a major issue in real terms but anything to cut back on stupid stresses is a good thing.

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9 responses to “A few updates from my side”

  1. Nathan Jeffery avatar
    Nathan Jeffery

    I’d say step one is reduce the number of domains you manage and consolidate content. This offers multiple benefits.

    Fewer sites to manage and update.
    One place to focus on publishing.
    Better SEO and ranking as all of your content will add value to one strong URL instead of diluting the ranking across multiple domains.

    On the ‘social’ front, personally I have streamlined a lot lately, mainly on my primary phone, but also in terms of my general habits.

    Path looked cool, but started losing their way with splitting off messaging, I also didn’t have much happening on there in the ‘greater’ scheme of things -> uninstalled.

    Facebook splitting off Messenger has just resulted in a mess, so -> uninstalled both of them.

    I now check Facebook in the mornings and evenings on my desktop, I haven’t spent the time that Robert Scoble recommends on optimising my feed so right now it is pretty much not the stuff I am interested in.

    I was loyal to Foursquare, but we’re now on different paths, it seems I am an Edge Case (http://nathanjeffery.co/2014/08/23/i-am-an-edge-case/).

    I’ve tried, VSCO, Flickr, and other photo apps, but I guess I don’t take anything worth sharing, so for now Instagram is where it is at for me if I ever snap something I think might be worth publishing.

    I have started posting more random photos to Twitter, essentially images I might want to share, but not content that I deem arty or creative. In general, I use Twitter substantially more than any other service and I have found that for my needs, it has proven itself over and over. I get a stream of good quality content and I have some fun and engaging conversations.

    Less is most definitely more.

    Good luck with your services detox. 😉

    Reply
    1. Paul avatar
      Paul

      Well no wonder you have been so quiet lately! I’m definitely thinking about which social services to cut back on. One that comes to mind is Tumblr. I use Twitter for much of what I’d use Tumblr for and Google+ turns out to be a more engaging social service than Tumblr. I’m a little on the fence about Path. I have some good connections there but not the ones I have on Facebook so its value remains pretty limited.

      As for my domains, I thought about consolidating all my stuff on one or two domains but I want to keep my Creative Opportunities blog pretty focused. This blog is for pretty much everything else and the nice thing about my portfolio site is that it can be pretty agnostic.

      Reply
      1. Nathan Jeffery avatar
        Nathan Jeffery

        Quietness is quite possibly, more attributed to me being the ‘busiest’ I have been in a very long time. Sometimes I literally just wake up and start working. I’ve gone through days when I don’t even listen to a single piece of music, which is not ideal. 🙂

        Tumblr -> toss it out, you already have a blog. 😀

        Google+ -> handles images really nicely, so I can see how it could offer a lot of value on the photography side of things.

        Domains -> I guess if you’ve got a specific use case and it’s not a mission to manage, then it’s all good. I’m not doing anything creative, so keeping all of my randomness in one place makes sense for my own use. I have found my ugly looking ‘bio’ page, gets quite a bit of traffic, but the site isn’t really being looked after, I need a good looking revamp or I should just redirect the traffic to my blog. (yes, I’m guilty of “just that one extra domain” syndrome too.)

        I’m in the process of reducing the number of domains I have email active on and will eventually channel all of my mail through either one work or one personal address.

        I’m trying to spend more of my time reading good content, solid articles or blog posts and less time scrolling through feeds. Twitter is usually the source of most of my reading list but I have found the Medium email notifications to be pretty accurate in terms of notifying me of content i’m interested in reading.

        I’m also trying to spend more time reading actual books, so instead of opening up FB in a Queue or while I’m waiting for something, I have been switching to Kindle and trying to make progress through some of the books I have told myself I’m going to read. 🙂

        Reply
        1. Paul avatar
          Paul

          I’ve been consolidating my email too. I’m collapsing my work email accounts into a single account and I set up my Gmail account to download my other personal mail for the time being.

          Reply
          1. Nathan Jeffery avatar
            Nathan Jeffery

            I’m on a mini mission to simplify and make things easier to manage. Unsubscribing from newsletters when ever they appear in my inbox as well.

          2. Paul avatar
            Paul

            Ditto. I also plan to spend time with my post converting as much to email as I can.

          3. Nathan Jeffery avatar
            Nathan Jeffery

            I did the convert to digital a while ago, only post I still get is silly reminders to renew my drivers licence and car licence – which should be done online anyway, but alas RSA gov…

            I just realised, that this is how it used to be done. A conversation, triggered by a post, hosted on a blog and outside the walls of a social network. 😀

          4. Paul avatar
            Paul

            So retro!

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