Google+ and My Thoughts After a Few Days

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Google+ LogoI suppose unless you live under a rock or just don’t really care much about these things, Google has taken another stab at a social media network. This time it’s called Google+. The last one they tried, Google Wave, was pretty much a flop. This time, I think they might have got it right, or at least certainly much better.  Currently, it’s in a beta phase where you have to be invited to join. Nothing more than a marketing gimmick really; however, I suppose it does help to keep out some of the riff-raff (bots, spammers, etc). Since this is in beta, the final interface and behavior may change from what I’m describing.

Before I go on too much farther, here is my Google+ Profile page (I made a custom sub-domain that redirects to the actual profile as I can remember it much easier than my Google+ ID).  Since I have shared some items with the Public Circle, anyone on the web can see those posts on my profile. More about this circle business later. Google+ is similar to Facebook in that you can upload photos and videos, share items with groups of people, comment on anything and everything, and it even has its own version of the Facebook Like button, the +1 button. That multi-colored button above this post is Google’s +1 button. You may have noticed when looking at my profile that it has a +1′s tab. These are all the items outside of Google’s network that I have clicked a +1 button on. This is one difference from Facebook’s profile which does not have a “Like” tab. By default, you would not have been able to see this tab; however, I chose to make it visible to the public.

Circles

So, what’s this Circle business? This is one of the most important aspects of Google+. Circles are groups or lists of people. You can add anyone to one or more circles. It has a few circles such as Family, Friends, Acquaintances, and Following already defined. You can, of course, make your own circles. For example, I have a NASCAR circle and a EverQuest II circle. Whenever you add someone to a circle (which is like Following someone on Twitter), they are notified that they’ve been added but they will not know which or how many circles they’ve been added to. There are also special global circles. One is the Extended Circles, which is like Facebook’s Friends of Friends list, where it will share an item with everyone in your circles plus everyone in their circles. There is also the Public circle which means anyone on the web. They will see the post on your profile page even if they are not a member of Google+. You can also choose to share something with just individual people.. like sending a private message. You can also choose whether or not anything you share can be re-shared.

Stuff I Haven’t Really Messed With Yet

There are some other features of Google+ that I haven’t messed with yet. One is Hangouts where you can share a webcam feed with a circle of people or watch someone else’s webcam feed. I don’t have a webcam so it’s not something that I would initiate myself. There is also a thing called Sparks which appears to be a list of interests that you want to follow. It seems to find all the shared posts relevant to the topic or interest you specify based off keywords and/or other search algorithms. So, in my case, I could choose to add a Spark that looked for anything NASCAR related. You can also Chat with others but I have not done that either. Come to think of it, I don’t remember me ever doing that in Facebook either.

Is it better than Facebook or Twitter?

All I can really say right now is that it’s different and will most likely augment them. It’s too premature at this early stage to give a final review. One of the problems right now is that Google+ lacks much of the functionality that Facebook and Twitter have due to the lack of 3rd-Party Apps and an API to interface with the service. All of this is coming I am sure. Right now I can update my Facebook status with a Tweet using the Selective Tweets Facebook application. Something like this doesn’t exist for Google+ yet (well, that I know of.. things change so fast these days). There’s also not an automated way for me to update Google+ with the current song I’m playing in Winamp. Although, I did just have an idea about that, hehe.

There are a lot of details I didn’t go into here because if I did this post would be huge and would probably warrant their own post.

For now, all I can say is that Google+ is not too bad. :)

My Myspace Page Is No More

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Well, after approximately 1.5 years of non-use I have cancelled my MySpace account. I haven’t looked at anyone else’s during that time either. With their new format, my profile was coming up as big white nothingness and I’m not going to spend the time to fix it LOL. Everyone that I care about is using Facebook now anyway. I guess that’s all there is to say about that. :)

Blog Upgraded to WordPress v3.2 and Twenty Eleven Theme

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Since this was a fairly major upgrade and changing of the default theme, I thought I’d blog about it! The actual upgrade process was no different than any other recent upgrade I’ve made:

  • Backed up the existing file structure and database.
  • Ran the automatic upgrade which took around five seconds to complete.
  • Modified the /wp-includes/vars.php file to force $is_apache to true so I don’t have to rely on the software to detect something which I know is true: 
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    /**
 * Whether the server software is Apache or something else
 * @global bool $is_apache
 */
//$is_apache = (strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'Apache') !== false || strpos($_SERVER['SERVER_SOFTWARE'], 'LiteSpeed') !== false);
$is_apache = true;
  • Modified the /wp-login.php file to force the start of a PHP session so that the Register Plus plug-in would work properly in my situation; although, I’m debating the necessity of this plug-in since I have registration disabled right now anyway LOL.: 
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    session_start();
/**
 * WordPress User Page
 *

That’s really all there was to the upgrade from WordPress v3.1.4 to WordPress v3.2 for my blog. Everything else has been related to trying out the new default Twenty Eleven theme and slowly modifying and tweaking it. Like I did with the Twenty Ten theme, I made a Twenty Eleven child theme so that I did not have to modify the parent’s files and risk loosing any of my changes if the theme was updated in the future. In my child theme, I’m using my own style.css (you have to), header.php, footer.php, and single.php files.

I’ve got the main front-end page looking satisfactorily now with adjustments to font colors and sizes and the overall layout of the page (margins and widths of sections) and how PHP code blocks appear for the posts that have them. I’m not going to go into detail about it since these kind of things are all subjective.

The next thing I will tackle is the appearance or layout of the single post page. Right now there’s a lot of wasted or white space below the header image (some might argue that the header image itself is a waste of space). Some of the white space is related to the Twitter and Facebook buttons being there and I really do not like where they are in relation to each other. I’d prefer them to be next to each other. Part of this is related to the plug-ins I am using. I’ll get it how I want it eventually.

The main reason why I’m not just staying with the Twenty Ten theme is that I figure the most compatible theme with the new WordPress version is going to be the new default theme that ships with it; although, all indications are that the Twenty Ten theme works just fine. Even so, some change is good every now and then. I hope your upgrade has gone or will go as smoothly and uneventful as mine. :)

For more information about the changes as well as the new system requirements for this version (mainly the minimum PHP and MySQL versions supported), read the WordPress 3.2 Codex Page.