Eric DeLabarWeb 2.0 from a Web Purist and J2EE Developer

Ok, I’ve been blogging for two weeks now, I think I may have the habit for it. I say this because if I don’t have a post done by my second cup of coffee I start twitching uncontrollably. Yeah. Seriously though, I’m a procrastinator, if I don’t have a deadline I will simple put things off forever, so in order to get this site a skin, I need a hard due date.

So, in honor of this year’s May 1st Reboot, the new style is going live on May 1st. I’ve signed up, submitted this site, and I now have roughly 29 days to make it something other than black on white. Now that doesn’t mean it will happen any time soon, in fact I’ll probably do most of it the week the site is down in preparation for the reboot, but I can assure you, May 1st is it, no more black and white.

It all started last week when I read an article on Vitamin about the launch of ClickPass at SxSW. I’d noticed OpenID before, mainly on the Ma.gnolia login page, but I never really saw a reason to get one for a single site. Today, I finally decided to check it out.

I started at ClickPass, which lead me to OpenID.net, which listed a page containing all of the OpenIds that I already have. Not really wanting to tie myself to a particular web app, I choose myOpenID because I liked the logo. I quickly created an account, then noticed that you could get a myOpenID for a domain, since I own delabar.org, openid.delabar.org was born. After some quick configuration, I had my open personal OpenID that was easy for me to remember and ready to use. Very cool.

Looking into the topic further, I found Sam Ruby’s instructions for setting up OpenId without using a service, interesting from a privacy perspective since you’re in complete control of your information, but at the same time you lose the third party verifying your identity. Leaving that debate for another day, the best part of the post was the first section where Sam talks about using delegation to claim your blog. With a simple block of code in your html head, something like the following, you can use your blog as your OpenID.

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<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://openid.delabar.org/eric" />

Using this quick test I verified this, and I can now use my blog URL as my OpenID. Now, what is my reason for doing that? I really don’t have one, since I’m already using my own domain as my OpenID. However, if I was using some other OpenID, like my Flickr URL for example, I would have a level of redirection that would allow me to swap Flickr out for Technorati without having to go and re-authenticate at all of my sites that use OpenID. Now, let’s bring in the Social Graph, a quick bit of XFN code in my link above, and now my OpenID identification page is part of my social graph.

I tried. I even had a rough draft; but when I went to try out my concept it didn’t work. My article on Friday was supposed to be on 301 redirecting from the old WordPress URL structure to a new URL structure, but after doing my research, I’m not sure it’s even possible. My guess is mod_redirect ignores URL parameters, but I definitely need to do some more homework.

The problem I was trying to solve is that Google has quite a few of my pages indexed, but they’re in the wrong permalink structure and I’d like to convert them to the friendlier structure that I have now. Looking around the web there are a few WordPress plug-ins that are supposed to help you migrate, but it seems they only migrate from one non-default structure to another. Currently, most of the links still work, but I’d prefer to have the new structure in the SERPs to gain the SEO benefits of having keywords in a URL.

So, as of now, the plan is to solve my problem and then post the article. Hopefully, if all goes well, there will also be another new article on this coming Friday, but only time will tell.

I have three main reasons for blogging, in this order:

1. I need my own personal soap box
2. Personal Branding
3. Additional Income

In my opinion, number one is probably the most prevalent reason to blog, in order to be interesting you need to have opinions, and if you’re opinions are worth having they’re worth sharing. I have things to say, and things I’d like to discuss, and sometimes, I just want to hear myself talk. On my site I’ll cover my topics in my way, I’ll tell you that I think Windows sucks, and that hand-crafter HTML beats a WYSIWYG any day, and that’s my prerogative. I suppose it’s not even entirely soap box, because I’m hoping to have at least a little sandbox here, since I’m usually playing with some new technology or framework it will probably be nice to have a place to show the world.

Number two is my ego. A few years ago, if you googled “Eric DeLabar” you’d find a lot of information about a professional soccer player with the same name. No offense to that guy, but I’m an internet professional who has done quite a bit of work in SEO, it wouldn’t look to good if I didn’t rank for my own name. As of now I’m doing a little better, but I’d like to permanently cement my way into the number one spot on Google. I’m also hoping a little work with XFN/FOAF and the Google Social Graph API will help to strengthen my online identity.

And the final reason is additional income. I’m not going to lie to you, my wife’s not going to let me spend hours a day to appease my ego, if she doesn’t see results she’ll keep me busy on other things. I’m not planning to go John Chow on this site, but I have a monetization strategy that I’m hoping might pay for some of my daughter’s college education (she’s 6-weeks old today so I have some time to work on it) and a lot of my retirement. What does this mean to you, the loyal reader? Basically, sometime in the future I’ll be selling advertising, I’ll probably have AdSense, and I’ll definitely try and take advantage of the Amazon Associates Program. I plan on doing all of this tastefully, I think I have reasonable goals, and as (hopefully) demonstrated by my priorities here, quality content is going to be number one priority.

As far as how I’m going to accomplish these goals, I’m looking to post every weekday, with the most attention paid to the Friday post which I’ll consider an article. I’m hoping the articles will be mostly tutorial in nature with an occasional op-ed on the industry, so far, I’ve kept this schedule for all of a week, but please be patient with me until I establish this site and my voice as an author.

Ah, creativity. As always, I’m in search of a muse. Now I have a rather plain looking website just begging for some style. I’m moderately happy with the markup, and I feel comfortable enough with WordPress’ theming capabilities that I’m ready start making this site look like something. The problem is what?

I’m a t-shirt and jeans type of guy, so it can’t be too formal. Musically, I’m punk-rock influenced with a touch of emo and an appreciation for the classic rock and jazz of the non-smooth variety, and I’ve been known to let my musical influences define me, which makes me think grunge may be the way to go. I’m 100% Web 2.0, so a little bit of shine is a must, but not so much to be cliche.

What does that leave me with? I don’t know. I guess it’s off to Smashing for some ideas.

I don’t remember how I came across the concept, but recently I discovered the tumblog, and I was intrigued by the concept. There are plenty of services will host a tumblog for you, with Tumblr being the most notable in my mind, but none of them provide the aggregation and organization that I’m looking for.

I’m a social application addict. I have a Flickr account, I share video to YouTube, I’m LinkedIn, I use Ma.gnolia, Facebook, and I’ve toyed around with Twitter and MySpace. In short, there’s too much of my content scattered about the web and I don’t see the need to manually re-create (or aggregate) it somewhere other than my own blog. I want the meta-information to go with the content. I want to know that a link was shared from Google Reader, or that I can grab the geo-tag information from my carefully organized Flickr photos. I can see a huge benefit to using the content where it lies and not necessarily pulling it all together and locking myself into a meta-social-aplication (sorry Tumblr.) In short, I want the power to aggregate the content the way I see fit.

To organize the content on this site, I think I want two things. First, the ability to generate full-fleged articles, with graphical banners, summaries, and the whole nine-yards, preferably called out into a separate section so people interested in my content get gain easy access to it through RSS. Second, a tumblog, similar in a way to Dan Cederholm’s Notebook (I love the little icons on the left), with a carefully aggregated mash-up of Flickr, Google Reader, Ma.gnolia, Twitter, and YouTube. I also want the ability to share quotes, although that’s not too high on my list since my social graph is not really geeky enough to enhance the content of this site and gossip and politics are not really my target content.

How am I going to do it? I’m not sure yet, MarsEdit’s AppleScript functionality and Automator may be helpful, but I’m not sure if it’s automated enough for my taste. I could probably right a shell script and cron-job it on my Dreamhost account, but that may be too automated. I want minimal work but maximum override, I guess I just need to think about it.