Sean’s Blog

This weekend, I went ot PodcampOhio.  It was just a really awesome new media conference here in Columbus.  I learned a whole bunch and met some cool people.  I thought I would share some of the things I picked up for everyone who couldn’t attend.

• Blackbird - A lightweight Twitter client for the Blackberry.  No need to use text messages for tweets.  Not as pretty as twitterberry (which I’ve been using for a while now), but (as far as I can tell) faster.  I’ve switched to Blackbird.
• Multiple Loops In Wordpress.  Requires some Wordpress hacking, but this looks to be a really cool setup.  I am currently playing with this on my Wordpress test install.  Here are the link to Mitch’s slides (from Studionashvegas.com) on how to do it.
• Custom Fields in Wordpress - Also from the slideshow, how to add custom fields for a sort of graphical tagging ability.  Currently playing with this in dev as well.
• CMSMadeSimple - I’ve been looking into CMSs for a side project I am working on but the learning curve for Joomla seems a bit steep for my liking.  CMSMadeSimple seems like an awesome solution.
• JungleDisk - I’ve heard of this service offered by Amazon, but after hearing some of the praises for it, I am really considering using it for backup.
• Summize - A way to dig into twitter for subjects.  Just about everyone seemed to be using it.

I really had a good time and would like to thank all the presenters and organizers.  I was really surprised to find something like this in my home town.  Do some digging in yours and you may be surprised.

I go back and forth with the social media thing. Granted, it has made the web a much more interesting place to be. But 90% is pure and utter crap. Instead of communication, it seems like a bunch of people making connections then having nothing to talk about.

Such was the case of the disastrous Myspace.com experiment. I got on Myspace way late in the curve. And although I ran into a couple people that I haven’t talked to in a while, it didn’t really open up any worthwhile conversations and became a spam magnet. So I left.

I’ve been thinking about it though, and it really seems that you get out what you put in. So I’m going to give it another shot. I’m going to go hit the big networks and see what I can see. Hopefully this will work out better. I’ll keep you all appraised on how it goes.

It’s 80 degrees and sunny outside and I am stuck at work. Ahh, the joys of being part of a 24X7 operation. Besides working today, it was a pretty good weekend. We spent along time in clearing out the the ivy that has slowly been trying to consume the house and then mulching the flowerbeds in the back yard.

We also walked down to the ice cream place down the street since I have been on a milkshake kick for the past couple days. Last, but not least, we installed a squirrel bungee, which has the potential to be INCREDIBLY AWESOME.

So I get to be at work on a day nobody is updating their blogs, going through back issues of xkcd (which is just brilliant) and I ran across a great commentary on the whole “managing your image online” debate :

I keep going back and forth on how to run this blog.  I want something that isn’t constrained to a topic and is just generally about me, but I also like to write about technology and would like to make an attempt at running a serious blog (ie by serious I mean getting more professional about it, not tone).

When I started out I had two blogs.  This one and a technology focused blog.  I sortof lost interest in the tech blog because I was still learning about blogging and how to best do it.  It ended up going under, but I think I am going to give it another shot.

In the last year I’ve learned a lot about blogging and social media in general and I think that this will help me to write a much more value packed and professional blog since I’ve been around the corner and have made a lot of mistakes that I’ve learned from.

What that means for you is that I am going to take this blog as really a personal blog.  A sort of catch-all that random things I’m interested in will show up on.  It probably means that i won’t be able to blog on this site daily, but who knows.  Over the last couple of months I’ve found that I really enjoy writing again and posting isn’t the chore that it was when I started.

Keep an eye here for when I officially kick off the new site.  It should only be a couple of weeks from now.  I really want to have some great content lined up before I start and am working through a couple of ideas now.

May has come around and it is really getting nice outside. Maybe it is to make up for all the snow and general craptasticness of winter in Central Ohio. But with the new house, we finally have a (usable) backyard and this weekend Jess and I got our patio furniture. Of course it rained most of the day Saturday.

It was just one of the standard sets you can get at most stores, but we replaced all the tiles on the top (they just pop out) with some 12X12 slate tiles from Lowe’s and it really looks great. Hopefully this will help alleviate my generally year round pastiness since my wifi just barely reaches the patio. What’s that you say? Maybe spend time out doors without the computer? That’s just crazy talk.

I was pretty good for a while of getting book reviews out after I read them, but recently I’ve let them pile up. This week I am hoping to clear out some of the backlog, so I should be publishing a good amount as we go, so check back for some.

Lastly, I’ve found that my library keeps a “reading list” of sorts online . It keeps (in my account) a list of books I’ve checked out and returned. This is a pretty cool feature, in my humble opinion. I know some people my have privacy concerns, but there is an option to clear the list. I also know for a fact that librarians in general are pretty fanatical about the right to keep your checkout history private (Thanks Librarians!).

Last week, when I installed the new theme for my site (Xplosive from BlogOhBlog), I noticed my stats in Wordpress.com Stats plugin dropped to 0. I thought this might just be a fluke, since every once in a while I will have a day where the visits are in the single digits. But by day two I was getting worried. Then I received a message from a friend using the Contact page and I knew something was up since it was still showing 0 hits.

I was still getting a page count via Google Analytics, but I love Wordpress.com Stats. The stats are (almost) real time, and it gives me just enough information for a quick over view of what has been going on. After some digging I found that this sometimes happens.

The fix is pretty easy, although it will require you to modify actual PHP pages (which is not that hard with the Wordpress Theme editor. I am assuming Wordpress 2.5 for this (although everything should work in earlier installations). Simply go to the Design Tab->Theme Editor. Now we will need to add the function in 3 places:

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I was trolling form my name to keep an eye on the Googlegangers the other day which I do with some regularity and I got a little sidetracked. My name isn’t that common and there isn’t that much movement. My resume over at emurse.com still holds the number one spot and that makes me happy. I’d like to get the blog or the site positioned a bit higher since most people don’t search on me with my middle initial, but all and all it’s not that bad of a ranking when I think of what some more commonly named people have to deal with.

Somehow, the post about a Irish politician always manages to maintain a spot in the top five which is weird.

Regardless, after searching for “Sean Lavelle” I just though I’d try my last name and see what I came up with. I was somewhat surprised with what I found. I knew about Lavelle Rubber Manufacturers in Wisconsin, but there was more!

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I’ve been getting burned out recently.  I just don’t seem to have the enthusiasm that I i previously did.  Not at work and not for blogging.   I’ve noticed that this occasionally happens and I usually have some good tricks for dealing with it.  I though since I’m going through one of these periods, I’d share some and hopefully get out of my rut.

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I’m still fumbling my way around Wordpress 2.5 since I upgraded over the weekend.  In general I like it alot, but some things have moved and it seems to take me a while to actually find them again.  One of the things I couldn’t find was who to schedule a post.  I live and die buy this feature and sort of freaked out when I couldn’t find it.  But then I calmed down and figure it how.  here is a quick step by step on scheduling posts in Wordpress 2.5:

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I was reading a post over at the Brazen Careerist which was something I’ve been thinking about recently as well. Anybody that blogs or writes pretty much anything on the interwebs occasionally gets comments to the effect of “Learn how to spell loser” or “Your grammar sucks”. I’ve had my share. It also sounds like Penelope got one too many of those comments as well. The fact is, these comments are not only unhelpful, but they are almost saying to a writer, the only thing worth talking about in your post is how bad your grammar/spelling is.

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