Sprangles

Why does this website exist?

It’s here for us to communicate with two groups of people:

1. Remote friends and family
2. Our future selves

So far, this website has met those needs well. The alternative for #1 would be mass emails, but I’m never a fan of that because it means maintaining an up-to-date email list and dealing with inappropriate reply-alls. It’s easier just to say “sprangles.com” over the telephone and let people keep up to date in their own time.

Need #2 is a bit hard to judge because we’re not living in the future with rocket cars and moon bread yet, but it’s already fun to go back and look at old pictures of stuff. So I think it’s doing a pretty good job.

The big issue of course is Privacy. We’re putting all this information out there on the web forever, and any yahoo can come along and look at it at any time. That’s not really a problem up until this point — in fact it’s been pretty interesting to get feedback and sometimes help random strangers.

I’m pretty happy to live a public life but things are changing now that the baby is coming along. Some folks like Heather are happy to share everything with the world, but I realised that I don’t want to make that decision for my kids. If they want to start living their lives on the internet one day then that should be their decision to make, and I shouldn’t take that choice away from them — not even a little bit.

After talking with Kylie I considered completely withdrawing into a friends-and-family-only Flickr account. That would have the benefit of being a very easy way to make everything personal, but it means forcing friends and family to sign up with Flickr to see the latest on the Johnson family. I’m still a bit undecided about whether that would’ve been a better approach — the only thing that makes me uncomfortable about that idea is that it doesn’t lend itself to multiple-photos-to-a-block-of-text that I like to do. Going with Flickr has a lot of benefits, but in the end that little issue made me decide not to go with that option (for now!).

What we decided to do was use Wordpress passwords on selected posts. That way I can leave everything as-is, but lock down the family-only posts. If you want to know the password then get in touch with Lana or me and we’ll let you know what it is (it’s the same for every post). It’s not a foolproof system, but it’ll do for the time being. Now I can continue to share all our excitement, but I can be a little more selective about audience.