Andrew's Inner Sanctum

Facebook launched Community Pages this week, which are part of a bigger picture for Facebook which I may write about at some point on Andrew Tech Help. Today I offer a small warning to all of you about what you write on Facebook and how Facebook will display this information publicly in places you don’t expect if you have an open profile.

This is an example of a community page for a school. The Related Posts by Friends section isn’t a big deal. Any of your friends who uses the words in the title of the page, in this case “Ormiston College” in any of their statuses or posts, will appear on this page, this section will vary between each person due to who their friends are and what they’ve said. The bigger section is the one which says Related Global Posts. This will list anything Facebook can find on Public Profiles about the topic, again in this case “Ormiston College”. So if you have a public profile, then you gotta be really careful about what you say when you mention words that could appear on a community page where they could be seen by anyone.

The easiest way to solve this is to make sure your profile is Private.

You can do this by going to the Account menu on the top right of the screen and choosing Privacy Settings and then clicking the Profile Information link. On this screen, set at a minimum the Posts by Me, Posts by Friends and Comments on Posts sections to Only Friends. It’s probably a good idea to set them ALL to Only Friends. As you can see below – I’ve also created another list and am setting custom settings applying to that list (which I’ve named probation).

At this point, while you’re fixing your privacy settings, I’d also check your contact details settings, by clicking Back to Privacy and then the Contact Information link. Here you can set what pieces of your contact information (phone, address, e-mail) etc appear to the public too. I’d set most of these to Only Friends as well.

So yea, I’ve hoped this little tutorial has helped with securing your Facebook Profile. These Community Pages are part of a bigger picture, but if you want them to work in your favour, then you gotta lock down your profile a little bit.

BTW: I happen to disagree with the comments in the pictures above, just to make sure you know!

Good Friday, it’s a day that I just don’t understand. Note that if you’re overly religious and take offensive at someone speaking against a religion, then you should probably stop reading this post right about now.

Now, before I get comments explaining to me about why we have Good Friday and why it’s called that (Jesus died to save our sins and we’re greatful etc etc), from a logical standpoint – I simply don’t see how someone dying  painfully nailed on a cross (whether it be fiction or fact) can be seen in any way good. I’ve been brought up to see that murder, for whatever purpose is a very bad thing, not good and definitely not good enough to have a public holiday behind it. I would have called it Bad Friday or Very Sad Friday then then Good Sunday for when Jesus supposedly comes back to life – that’s what I would logically see as the “Good” bit! Anyway – enough about the logics of it all, now onto my actual issue.

EVERYTHING IS SHUT TODAY!! For someone who’s not religious and staying away from churches, there’s not much to do really. The newspaper isn’t printed (even though the internet doesn’t take a break thank goodness), most shops are closed, most attractions are closed, radio shows are on holidays and the TV is full of movies about Jesus! – it’s a public holiday with nothing to do. There’s a large number of people who aren’t Christians (especially Muslims, Hindus and Atheists etc) who won’t be spending the day in church feeling sorry for Jesus and eating fish. What are we supposed to do. I can understand Christmas day being a public holiday and even Easter Sunday, because at least you can participate in the commercial part of it, with gift and egg giving no matter what religion you are, but Good Friday has nothing and is specifically Christian only! ANZAC Day is also an important public holiday, because it affects all Australians, as does Australia Day, and even those days aren’t as shut down as Good Friday is!

So I hope in the future we can lift the commercial absence of  Good Friday for those of us who do not wish to participate, so we can have a public holiday with something to do (like Labor Day). The Christians who wish to take Good Friday off and go to church should fully be allowed to and I have no problem them doing that, but the rest of us should be allowed to do more than sit at home with less to do than normal.

BTW – before I go, stuff like this really annoys me: http://www.news.com.au/national/atheists-are-believers-who-hate-god-says-anglican-archbishop-peter-jensen/comments-e6frfkvr-1225848927144 – Atheists are simply people who do not believe there is any God at all, we do not hate your God as you cannot hate something which doesn’t exist! To any religious people I’ve offended, I’m sorry, but I warned you not to read, and this is my blog where I can express my thoughts on things.