I’ve done a bit of tidying up of my account on Facebook today. I replied to some messages and requests, updated my profile and, yes, trimmed my friends list.

As a result, and so not to offend anyone I may have removed, I thought I would post the note I wrote about social networking for my personal website here:

A note about social networking

Managing your online life can become complicated, so I have developed my own particular way of dealing with social networking sites and services.

I am on Facebook but I use it in a very restricted way. I use it for close friends and social things. Friend requests from people I haven’t actually met are likely to be ignored!

If you are just interested in keeping track of what I am up to the best approach is to follow me on Twitter.

Professional contacts and former work colleagues should connect with me through LinkedIn.

You can also sign up to the RSS feed of my ‘Strange Thoughts‘ blog.

I don’t really want to whinge, but 2009 was something of a rough year for me. There were one or two highlights, and I am more and more aware of how grateful I should be for the support of good friends, but the year in general was characterised by frustration, disappointment and unhappiness.

However, in the last quarter of 2009 things began to brighten up and I end the year in a much better state than I began it. So I look forward to 2010 with a considerable amount of optimism.

Curiously though, I enter the new year without any plans. I have no particular career or political ambitions for the next twelve months. I have vague notions of things I’d like to do or sort out but nothing concrete enough to write down. I certainly don’t have any new year’s resolutions.

Whether or not this absence of planning is connected with my optimistic outlook I find it difficult to tell. There is something a bit liberating in just waiting to see what turns up.

Looking ahead though I think there is one thing that I should resolve to do over the next year, and that is to make the most of those opportunities that I come across and not let them slip away. Carpe diem and all that.

So it looks like 2010 is to be a year of seeing how things go. I wonder what will happen.

The view from my back door this morning:

Why “Strange Thoughts”?

Well, my name is Strange. No, really it is. Andy Strange.

With a name like that, as you can imagine, I’ve heard a number of name related jokes over the years. I don’t think I am especially sensitive about it. It has the advantage of being memorable. However, it can become a bit tedious and predictable. Many people have thought that they have come up with a witty and original pun on my name. They haven’t. I have heard it before.

So when I have had to think of a title for stuff that I do, such as personal websites and blogs, I have been very wary of using a named based around an eponymous pun. I’ve thought that it would be far too predictable.

Which meant that when thinking about a name for this blog I resisted. No, I really did. I resisted. But the pull of the obvious was just too strong.

My name is Strange. These are my thoughts. This is my blog.

Will any of those thoughts by strange, as opposed to Strange? Probably. You be the judge.

Before I start posting on this blog in earnest, I thought I had better set out how it came about.

Since September 2006 I have been writing my Process Guy blog. I used it to write mainly about politics, especially the internal affairs of the Liberal Democrats, and in a random way about other things that interested me or I felt strongly about.   I did not have any great purpose for the blog other than to develop my writing skills and learn about the process of blogging.

This I feel I have achieved. So much so that I began to have wider ambitions for the blog. I began to want to see if I could use it to start influencing opinions. The main focus for this was again the internal affairs of the Liberal Democrats. However, my attempts to do this led to me feeling restricted by the format of my old blog. This was partly the technical limitiations of the Blogger platform, but also the style of the blog that I had adopted, and in particular the name. While I knew what I meant by “Process Guy”, I’m not sure anyone else did! In fact, it may have put some people off.

I admit that any lack of success with my blogging can be attributed more to my inability to post frequently than anything else. It has to be said that the frequency of my posts was somewhat erratic. However, I felt a new approach was needed.

At the same time I was becoming more conscious that I was failing to get the most out of my various online presences. I believe that having a strong online identity will be important for me in achieving those things I want to achieve both in politics and professionally. I am not sure my old blog, the small website (more a holding page) that used to be at my personal website’s URL, and the other places that stuff about me can be found online were really doing me justice.

So it was becoming clear that it was time for a change.

So I decided to go away and come up with a completely fresh approach that would fit with what I wanted to do. So I shut up shop at the old blog, spent some weeks doing some head scratching, and then spent more weeks playing around with WordPress template code, and developed a new design for a personal website/blog. The plan was to try and combine my different online outputs and create a very strong single online home for myself.

Then, well, not a lot happened. As is sometimes the case with me I began to think that my ambitions and creativity had leaped a little ahead of the practicalities. I realised that I had built something that was over complicated and would be difficult to maintain. So I different approach was needed. I decided to go back to having a more straightforward blog and then do something much simpler with my personal website.

Luckily the WordPress theme I had developed turned out to be pretty robust and easy to adapt so I didn’t have to start coding from scratch. So over the last couple of days I stripped down the old theme and created this design for my new Strange Thoughts blog.

I hope you like it.

This is my new WordPress based blog.

Not much to see here yet, but there should be some good stuff soon.