My Two Facebook Accounts - FAQ

I have two Facebook accounts, one as Steve Hayes and the other as Stephen Hayes. 

As I am frequently asked about this I thought I should write a blog post to answer the most frequently asked questions (FAQ) to save a lot of typing every time I'm asked. 

The short answer is that I hoped to use the Steve Hayes account as a general one for keeping in touch with family and friends, and the Stephen Hayes account (which is linked to my author page on Facebook) for keeping in touch with people who have read books I have written, or might want to read them, or are generally interested in books, literature and writing. 

The story is more complicated than that, however.

At the time of writing this, I only have access to my Stephen Hayes account on my computer, and I only have access to my Steve Hayes account on my phone. 

Using a phone for Facebook is OK for  for quick scrolling to see what is happening and recording "reactions" to people's posts in the hope that that will encourage Facebook's algorithms to continue showing those people's posts to me. The phone also works for video links. The phone is not good for comments or replies other than facile one-liners. So anything that requires thoughtful replies longer than a line or two I save for my computer, and that means I'm using the "Stephen Hayes" account, which has fewer followers/friends, and therefore doesn't always work. 

I used to have full access to my Stephen Hayes account (and my author page) from my laptop computer (using Firefox on Windows 7), but that was stolen in October 2023, and appears to be irreplaceable.

I used to have full access to my Steve Hayes account on my desktop computer (using the Maxthon browser on Windows XP), but since about September/October  2023 Facebook has been tossing me out after about 20-30 seconds, so I just have time to see that someone has a birthday, but not enough time to send them birthday greetings. And if I want to see if there is an update to the Maxthon browser that might work better, it takes me to the Maxthon Facebook page, which tosses me out after 20 seconds. And in case anyone asks about that, I used the Maxthon browser because it worked on Facebook when most other browsers didn't. It was the last resort.

I do have limited access to my Stephen Hayes account from my desktop computer, however, using Firefox Version 41 (less bloated than newer versions, and also more secure, since it runs NoScript). It keeps telling me that my browser is not supported, and that I'm not getting the full benefits of Facebook, but it does let me read and comment on posts. 

As for why I have two Facebook accounts, that goes back several years. 

I originally had only the Steve Hayes account back when Facebook was only for current students in tertiary education. Then suddenly Facebook blocked my access to my account unless I downloaded and installed an undescribed piece of software on my computer. I suspected that the thing they wanted me to install was some kind of spyware, and refused to download it, and opened another account in the name of Stephen Hayes as a kind of emergency account to keep in touch with people. If any of my friends on the other account asked to be friends on the new one, I accepted them, but I didn't solicit friends other than people I needed to be in frequent contact with.

After a few months Facebook unblocked the Steve Hayes account and dropped the demand that I install the unknown software, so I began using the Steve Hayes account for most things again, but kept the Stephen Hayes one for emergencies, and eventually started using it mainly for literary stuff, as described above. 

But right now (December 2023) I use whichever account gives me access on the device which I happen to be using at the moment, and the kind of access Facebook gives me to either account on which device seems to change from week to week. Last week when I tried to go into the Steve Hayes account from my computer, all I saw was a blank black screen. Today I can see everything on the screen, but only for 20 seconds or so. 

Tomorrow it may work, or it may not. It depends on whatever torments the UX (User Experience) boffins at Facebook are thinking up next. I just wish they would take seriously the adage "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But that's too much to ask.

For more reliable communication, use email. 

 

Seeing old friends

We have visited several old friends on our holiday travels so far, most of whiom we had not seen for quite a long time.

In Clarens we saw Dons and Anneke Kritzinger. Dons was a missiologist at the University of Pretoria, and once produced an interesting series of booklets on the uncompleted missionary task in the Transvaal. Even though they are now some 30 years old, they are probably still useful. Dons and Anneke retired to Clarens some years ago, and Dons is still active in the local congregation of the Uniting Reformed Church, and in an ecumenical clergy group in the town.

We stayed overnight in Barrydale, and saw Dick and Josephine Usher. I had not seen Dick for many years, and had never met Josephine. I knew Dick as a journalist on the Daily News in Durban in 1969, when he was a member of our Christian Institute youth groups, and we produced a magazine called Ikon, which proved far too radical for the Christian Institute, so we had to withdraw the first issue and publish it independently.I went to Namibia and Dick went to the USA, so we lost touch, though Dick later returned to South Africa and worked on the Sunday Tribune and The Friend in Bloemfontein. The timing of our visit wasn't too good, as Dick has cancer, and has to travel to Somerset West for treatment once a week, and found company rather tiring, but it was good to see him.

We went on to Robertson, where we visited a cousin, Sandy Struckmeyer, whom I had not met before, and then saw Fr Zacharias van Wyk (in the world Edmund), who has established an Orthodox centre just outside the town. The centre is described by Archbishop Sergios as almost a monastery, and certainly has the atmosphere of peace one finds in monasteries, Fr Zacharias used to come to Johannesburg to visit our parish of St Nicholas of Japan in Brixton.

We went on to Hermanus, where we stayed at the Volmoed community, and saw two old friends there. One was John de Gruchy, with whom I am writing a book on the charismatic renewal movement in South Africa, and the other is Barry Wood, whom I had met about 45 years ago at student conferences and the like, and last saw in 1982. We spent four days at Volmoed, which was very peaceful and beautiful, and then went to Villiersdorp and Cape Town.

Follow me...

Follow me on Tumblr.

Wherever you go on the web these days you see exhortations to "Follow me!"

Usually it's on Twitter, but quite often it's on other sites as well. I suppose it's part of the Twitterisation of the web. Some social networking sites that used to have "friends" now refer to "followers".

I gather that you can also get software that will go through the people you follow on Twitter and remove those who don't follow you in return. That seems strange to me. I've never asked anyone to follow me on Twitter, other than my own immediate family, and none of them are on Twitter anyway.

Twitter used to say that what you should tweet about was "what are you doing right now". It was a bit silly because the only possible answer one could give was "tweeting on Twitter". Now they've broadened it a bit to "what's happening?"

But I've never asked anyone to follow me on Twitter, and I don't ask or expect anyone I follow on Twitter to follow me in return. I follow people and groups that interest me, and find the easiest way of doing it is through the Daily Paper. which gives a digest of the main links. It's not perfect, as it doesn't show every link, and I'm not sure what selection criteria it uses - I suspect that it may give preference to links to articles that have pictures, which are not always the most interesting ones.

But I don't ask people to follow me on Twitter.

Follow me on Tumblr.

Why Tumblr?

Tumblr is probably one of the most underrated things on the web.

It's a sort of quick 'n dirty blog site, where you can post stuff by e-mail, or in various other ways with a minimum of effort. It's a kind of blog site for non-geeks, for people who are not web fundis, and makes it easy for ordinary people to use. The trouble is that it is a non-geek site that only geeks know about and use. You don't have to know HTML or CSS or any of that fancy stuff. It's WYGIWYS -- what you get is what you see.

Follow me on Tumblr.

No, I don't mean that literally.

Yes, you can follow people on Tumblr in the same way as you can follow them on Twitter. It's like Twitter except that it's not limited to 140 characters, and you can log in and see a feed of all the people you "follow". But you can also just go in there and read it, without having an account.

So why should you follow me on Tumblr?

Three of my blogs feed into Tumblr, and so you can see a digest of the recent posts and links to them. If one of them catches your fancy, you can click on the link and go to the full post and read it, and comment if you like. And if it doesn't interest you, you can skip it.

I post in various blogs, depending on the topic and the content and how I want to format it. Most, but not all of my theological stuff goes on Khanya. Most, but not all of my political and general stuff goes on Notes from underground (that's this one). And stuff about books and literature can go in either. And then there are the family history and genealogy ones.

Instead of going to each of them in turn to see if there are any new posts that might interest you, or getting an RSS feed of one and missing the others, or of all three and wasting bandwidth on stuff you don't want, you can go to Tumblr and see if there is anything that interests you or not.

Blogger, the software for this blog, has a "Blog this" feature, which I use quite a lot. It grabs a paragraph or two from a web site and lets you use it as the basis of a blog post, but it usually needs tweaking and fiddling with HTML to get it looking half decent. But sometimes one doesn't want to do that. You just want a link to a web site to remind you what it was about and share it with others, perhaps. Tumblr lets you do that easily -- for example this one, about a steam engine that rescued passengers from electric trains stranded in the snow.

I call my Tumblr site Marginalia. If my life as I live it and experience it is a book, those are some notes and comments written in the margins.

No, Tumblr isn't perfect, and I'm still playing around with it to see what it can and can't do, but if you want to "follow" me anywhere, then follow me on Tumblr.

Seek and ye shall find

I've lost touch with a few old friends, and so I've entered their details in a "reverse people finder" at:

http://who-me.com/

I've subsequently found a couple of them.

One found me through my web page, which shouldn't be too difficult. Another I found through Google -- entering her name in normal search brought up too many hits. But I searched images, and wondered how easy it would be to recognise someone after 30 years. Well, bingo. Up popped an image, and my old friend had changed, of course, but was still recognisable.

So I haven't yet found anyone through who-me, but I'm still hoping.