A lot of people can’t help answering quizzes on Facebook. Heck, some people on my Friends list do nothing there but answer every single one. I, for one, answered some of them, but I vowed not to do it anymore since it doesn’t really add substance to the activity stream of my news feed. I really can’t blame them, and neither should you, because there may be a quiz in there that would really pique your interest and intrigue to the brink of insanity if you didn’t even think about trying to answer the question “what would the result be?”

However, for some people, it sometimes gets too annoying to see results of quizzes that are simply juvenile and mediocre. Sure you can “Hide” whatever you want to hide from your News Feed, but it becomes a chore that you may not be enjoying the experience anymore. Further more, Facebook, with all its bells and whistles, aren’t really transparent with all the changes and improvements they somehow implement without notice. One of which is the Filter list. The filter list is the one on the left side, as shown below.

By default, the first item on the list is the News Feed. This filter lists the activity stream of your friends, whether they posted a note, uploaded a picture, answered a quiz, or simply updated their status. This filter can sometimes get too noisy, what with all the quizzes your friends answered, videos they linked to, etc. For those who just want the status updates of their friends, simply drag and drop the filter for Status Updates to the top of the Filter list. Whenever you open your Facebook home page, it will display ONLY your friends’ Status Updates. If you prefer to see notes, videos, or photos posted by your friends, simply drag and drop the filter apropos to what you want to see. Hey, I used the word apropos appropriately. I think.

Essentially, whatever is on top of the Filter list will be displayed by default whenever you open up your Facebook home page. You can further explore Facebook’s filtering system by creating custom filters, but it is quite limited to what you can actually filter, meaning you can only filter WHO will appear on your activity stream. For now.

What do you do to prevent information overload?

The past few weeks have been more focused on making my finances a little bit more cost-efficient. Since I can’t do much about the household and familial needs, I decided to turn my attention to my online costs.

Currently, I maintain four domains (will.ph, gormful.com, shutterview.net, and infi8.com). All of my domains are powered by WordPress and hosted with 1and1 Webhosting. I’ve been with my host for more than two years now, and so far, I can’t complain. However, I wanted to find out if I can still cut back on my hosting expenses. Looking at my domains, I can only discontinue one of them, with infi8.com being the most eligible candidate for the axe, but not until I find new homes for my subdomain residents (friends and family, all two of them). The axe gets stayed in the meantime while I collect my thoughts and think about this more.

Also, with four domains to maintain, it’s beginning to eat up a lot of my free time, which is something that is very rare and precious for me. I decided to move the content of gormful.com to Tumblr. I chose Tumblr because I wanted to try out its engine, and that the themes are more customizable than WordPress.com’s offering.

The move was a bit tedious as Tumblr doesn’t support importing posts from WordPress, and vice versa. I had to re-post each and every single entry I had from gormful.com to Tumblr. Luckily, I only have about 19 entries, so it wasn’t so bad. I also found a theme that, with a few tweaks here and there, I was able to customize a theme that suited my taste. All in all, it took me less than a couple of hours to move the entries and update the A record of gormful.com to point to my Tumblr. Now, I don’t have to spend as much time as I did before to maintain gormful.com. I can even reblog entries with a few clicks from Tumblr blogs that I follow. It definitely made updating gormful.com more regularly an easy task, though I haven’t reblogged anything yet.

My photoblog, shutterview.net, may be a little bit neglected, and new entries are very infrequent, but that is caused by my inherent ability to procrastinate. I love taking pictures, but I dislike having to undergo the tedious process of editing/resizing pictures and uploading them. Hence, the lack of updates. I will be spending more time with it in the future, but for now, a lot of my time has been spent in one big juggling act.

As for this blog, I’m kinda stuck in a rut right now and I can’t seem to feel inspired with what’s going on in the tech world that it doesn’t prompt me to write anything about it. Hence, this filler pretending to be a post.