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I absolutely hate this ' let's just put it on Facebook'. My wife was planning to go to this boutique kids shoe shop. Checked the opening hours,etc. Went there j

I absolutely hate this ' let's just put it on Facebook'. My wife was planning to go to this boutique kids shoe shop. Checked the opening hours,etc. Went there just to see the shop closed. Calls the owner, and she's all surprised: oh but I did post on Facebook that I'll be open from 2pm..

lbriner 4y ago
I do as well but let's be honest, many people who create sites for money will not necessarily coach the business to keep it simple, since they will earn less money from it. By the time you add a CMS (to help the business not screw up the markup), some design help and all the features that the business thinks are easy because "it is just a form", and you are paying several thousand dollars, way more than many small business think is worth it. The other alternative, I guess, is something like Shopify but many people I have talked to struggle to see why paying a monthly subscription is money well-spent to get something always up to date and fresh. They'll pay a shop assistant pittance which is still more than they would need to pay for Shopping-as-a-service and get less value.
mr_gibbins 4y ago
Unfortunately, businesses have to go to where the customers are. Many customers now are 100% Facebook-era, particularly true of the young and those older folk late to computing, and it might not occur to them to check https://www.widgetsRus.com https://www.widgetsRus.com before searching for Widgets R Us on Facebook. Updating a 'personal' site is also a PITA IF you don't know what you are doing or don't have a streamlined process, e.g. for me I'd just amend the .htm page to say I'm shut from 2pm and FTP it up, 2 minutes, but someone non-savvy will always prefer to post a new message on FB saying 'hey, shutting at 2pm today', takes even less time and less cognitive load. I'm not saying this is a good thing, by the way. But it's understandable. EDIT: Not to mention, updating a site on the move is difficult. Pull latest version of site (Github), amend .htm (some notepad app?), then an FTP client on the phone, log in, find, push the file, close, check. Versus opening the FB app and doing some typing.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  If we actually got the semantic web that was promised, back in the burgeoning xhtml days, then it seems like Facebook / own website could simply duplicate the latest data from the other page.
  - mawise 4y ago
    There's a nifty tool called Bridgy that helps with this--it's out of the IndieWeb community with their POSSE model: Post on Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/
- mattl 4y ago
  Is there a technical reason you’re only using three letter extensions for HTML files?
  - shadowofneptune 4y ago
    The 8.3 filename structure has a long half-life.
  - zakki 4y ago
    I guess related to Windows file extension in the past. 3 letters only.
    - mattl 4y ago
      8.3 is CP/M or maybe earlier even, I guess?
- bachmeier 4y ago
  > Pull latest version of site (Github) What does that have to do with personal site vs Facebook? If Github is a problem, don't use Github if you regularly need to update and for some reason you can't do it using the web editor. I mean, WordPress is kind of a big deal. There's nothing wrong with Facebook if you like a kind of ugly website that randomly pops up crap to prevent people from viewing your site. If you're concerned about people that only use Facebook and no other sites, you can duplicate material on Facebook.
Bakary 4y ago
Of all businesses a boutique kids shoe shop is sure to attract the Facebook crowd as it exists today in the West at least
- cosmodisk 4y ago
  I have no doub it does, but checking a business' Facebook account to see if they are open would probably be the last thing I could come up with.
Minor49er 4y ago
I've had this happen too at Armageddon Shop in Cambridge. When I showed up, the two employees told me to leave because they posted on Facebook that they were closing two hours early due to nobody showing up I don't even use Facebook, and if I did, I wouldn't check every place I wanted to go on it before I went there

lbriner 4y ago

I do as well but let's be honest, many people who create sites for money will not necessarily coach the business to keep it simple, since they will earn less money from it. By the time you add a CMS (to help the business not screw up the markup), some design help and all the features that the business thinks are easy because "it is just a form", and you are paying several thousand dollars, way more than many small business think is worth it. The other alternative, I guess, is something like Shopify but many people I have talked to struggle to see why paying a monthly subscription is money well-spent to get something always up to date and fresh. They'll pay a shop assistant pittance which is still more than they would need to pay for Shopping-as-a-service and get less value.

mr_gibbins 4y ago

Unfortunately, businesses have to go to where the customers are. Many customers now are 100% Facebook-era, particularly true of the young and those older folk late to computing, and it might not occur to them to check https://www.widgetsRus.com https://www.widgetsRus.com before searching for Widgets R Us on Facebook. Updating a 'personal' site is also a PITA IF you don't know what you are doing or don't have a streamlined process, e.g. for me I'd just amend the .htm page to say I'm shut from 2pm and FTP it up, 2 minutes, but someone non-savvy will always prefer to post a new message on FB saying 'hey, shutting at 2pm today', takes even less time and less cognitive load. I'm not saying this is a good thing, by the way. But it's understandable. EDIT: Not to mention, updating a site on the move is difficult. Pull latest version of site (Github), amend .htm (some notepad app?), then an FTP client on the phone, log in, find, push the file, close, check. Versus opening the FB app and doing some typing.

pbhjpbhj 4y ago
If we actually got the semantic web that was promised, back in the burgeoning xhtml days, then it seems like Facebook / own website could simply duplicate the latest data from the other page.
- mawise 4y ago
  There's a nifty tool called Bridgy that helps with this--it's out of the IndieWeb community with their POSSE model: Post on Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere https://brid.gy/ https://brid.gy/
mattl 4y ago
Is there a technical reason you’re only using three letter extensions for HTML files?
- shadowofneptune 4y ago
  The 8.3 filename structure has a long half-life.
- zakki 4y ago
  I guess related to Windows file extension in the past. 3 letters only.
  - mattl 4y ago
    8.3 is CP/M or maybe earlier even, I guess?
bachmeier 4y ago
> Pull latest version of site (Github) What does that have to do with personal site vs Facebook? If Github is a problem, don't use Github if you regularly need to update and for some reason you can't do it using the web editor. I mean, WordPress is kind of a big deal. There's nothing wrong with Facebook if you like a kind of ugly website that randomly pops up crap to prevent people from viewing your site. If you're concerned about people that only use Facebook and no other sites, you can duplicate material on Facebook.

Bakary 4y ago

Of all businesses a boutique kids shoe shop is sure to attract the Facebook crowd as it exists today in the West at least

cosmodisk 4y ago
I have no doub it does, but checking a business' Facebook account to see if they are open would probably be the last thing I could come up with.

Minor49er 4y ago

I've had this happen too at Armageddon Shop in Cambridge. When I showed up, the two employees told me to leave because they posted on Facebook that they were closing two hours early due to nobody showing up I don't even use Facebook, and if I did, I wouldn't check every place I wanted to go on it before I went there