Today I decided to remove my e-mail signatures and also stop feeding my blog to Facebook. Here are my old signatures:

-- 
Sean Whitton / <sean // AT NO SPAM PLEASE \\ silentflame.com>
OpenPGP KeyID: 0x3B6D411B
http://sean.whitton.me/

-- 
Sean Whitton / http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ball3162/

for my main e-mail address and my university address respectively. Actually almost all this information is superfluous. My GPG key is because the message is signed so you can extract it from that, and if you actually want the info you are probably someone who looks for the signature out of habit and/or knows how to use a keyserver. And I’m not making a political point because I don’t use GPG (by e-mail that is) very often; I just sign my e-mails and very occasionally encrypt one.

My name and e-mail are obviously superfluous. And if it’s just to make sure you get labelled when quoted—it doesn’t really make much difference, people will do it or they won’t. And no-one actually quotes me.

So the URL of my personal website and its mirror on the university web servers is the only thing worth keeping, but I don’t really like the idea of advertising the site. Firstly because there is almost no actual content on it, aside from maybe my blog, and because a personal website is inevitably one’s preferred image to the world which isn’t so great, and shoving it in people’s faces as a mail signature only furthers this. So I’m dropping the self-important signatures. However hard it is to ignore all the work I did to get neat signature switching working in Gnus.

I’m also stopping the feed of this blog to Facebook. I think I only really did it because I wanted hits; this is bad. It’s also changed my willingness to write things even though it’s all public anyway. This is bad and not like me so I shouldn’t let it happen.