A quick welcome to everyone passing through via DZone! Please subscribe, I’d love to have you back!
If you’re new here, please excuse the mess, it’s still a work in progress since the content has been my number one priority. Speaking of content, I finally replaced the default Wordpress about page, so go check mine out if you’re interested!
If you’re here because of Josh Porter’s posts on social network and social niche sites on his blog Bokardo, you might find these posts interesting:
If you like what you’re reading, please subscribe! I post every weekday on “Web 2.0” topics like JavaScript, CSS, web semantics, and of course the social web.
(Please excuse the looks, I’m not quite done with the theme for this site yet, but it looks much better than a week ago!)
First things first, three new entries to the Blogroll: Bokardo, Like It Matters, and Own Your Identity. I’ve been a long-time Bokardo reader, and the other two entries came from that. Josh Porter from Bokardo is a contributer to Own Your Identity, which is also contributed to by Brian Oberkirch of Like It Matters and Myles Weissleder. Own Your Identity is the blog for the Ch.imp (Content Hub and Identity Management Platform) project, which is described in this post. I love the concept, a decentralized identity hub that you install on your own domain.
I also came across ClaimID, a blog on managing your online identity, which lead me to MicroID, which seems like a microformat-based cross between FOAF’s foaf:mbox_sha1sum and an inverted XFN rel="me", in other words you place a meta element on pages that you own with a hash generated from your online identity (consisting of email and url), which looks something like this:
<meta name="microid" content="mailto+http:sha1:53410a9d6d408f3a92288a6543f16f4a9703ceea"/>I’m not 100% sold yet and I think I’m missing some of the details, but I’m interested, and I’ve added it to my head element.
I haven’t said anything about it yet, but I love Google Reader. Not only is it an amazing feed reader, it has a neat little service where it recommends feeds to you based on your existing reading list. Yesterday night it recommended Matt Snider’s blog to me.
Matt writes about JavaScript and JavaScript frameworks, and includes some very in depth analysis and excellent code examples. Matt, like myself, seems to prefer a very OO approach to JavaScript, so I will probably be referencing his articles in future posts. If JavaScript is your thing, go check out his site, subscribe to his feed, and be sure to checkout the archives for some great stuff like this article about an isDOMReady implementation, and a great overview of JavaScript frameworks and libraries.
As I said yesterday, if you or someone you know blogs about topics similar to mine, please let me know. If I like the site, I’ll gladly add it to my blogroll, write about it, and probably use it as a conversation started in a future article.
My blogroll needs some love. I’m looking for some quality blogs out there who are just starting up. They should be on a similar topic, somewhere close to SEO, CSS, JavaScript, Web Standards, and/or Java Programming, but that’s really open for negotiation.
Here’s my problem, my co-workers don’t blog, I doubt most of them have even heard of Wordpress, and nobody really has enough of a passion to take the time to write. So, if you’ve got a young blog, or you know of a blog on a similar topic, please send me a link in a comment. I’m looking for blogs that update often, or at least regularly, because I need some fresh, on-topic content to comment on and discuss. Who’s out there? This is not a link exchange request, I don’t expect reciprocation, but I wouldn’t complain if you did, and please don’t spam me with links to non-related sites.
In other news, I’ve come across a few interesting Wordpress plugins that I’m going to be trying out, wp-typogrify, and Registered Users Only (not for this blog). So, look for those changes and if I find anything interesting about them I’ll let you know!
Since I found out that HappyCog redid the admin for WordPress 2.5 I’ve been interested to see what it looks like. This morning I decided it was time. I originally used the DreamHost one-click install to setup my initial install, and although it is a nice feature, I decided that SVN was more my thing. Going through the steps provided was pretty simple, and my upgrade was complete in about five minutes total.
As far as compatibility, all of my existing plugins “worked” but the XML Sitemap plug-in looks a little funny thanks to the new admin design. While I was at it I added the ClickPass plugin as a follow-up to my recent foray into OpenID. I’m not sure it’s working correctly, I can login with my ClickPass account (which I’m assuming is cookie based), but have been unsuccessful merging my preferred OpenID, or even the one Technorati provides. I will have to look into that one a little further, but until then, no ClickPass for me.
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.
I have three main reasons for blogging, in this order:
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
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.
