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’ve been smoke free for just about a week now.  It hasn’t been any where near as bad as I was thinking it was going to be.  I’m a little more irritable and a little twitchier, but all and all it is going pretty well.  I’ve really found that the hardest part so far has been at work.

At work it gives me a great exuse to get up and go outside for a while.  And I’ve been missing that.  Luckily, I don’t have any smoking buddies in my department, so everyone I talk to is already out there and they don’t come in to see if I want to go out.

I’ve been using the patch, which for me, is really the only effective method that I’ve tried.  It curbs the cravings enough that I’m not constantly thinking about it.  It does manage to give me some really crazy dreams though.  I don’t really remember what they are about, all I know is they are weird.

I’m feeling pretty good about this attempt though.  I actually really want to quit and while everything hasn’t gone perfectly, it seems to be going pretty well.

I’m back from vacation .  I took a bunch of pictures and some of them came out really well.  I hope to get those up later this week, but right now I’m just trying to get back into the swing of things.

Over the weekend I went sailing for the first time.  My dad owns a little 12 foot Snark and we went out a couple times on Lake Erie this weekend.  It was a lot of fun.  Not really a transportable hobby though since there aren’t a lot of sailing opportunities in Columbus.

Anyways, a bunch of stuff going on this week and I’ve hopefully got some good posts in the work that I should have up soon.

I know it’s been a couple days since I’ve posted anything, which is unusual, since I’ve been pretty good about doing one post per day.  I’ve been pretty busy and we had a big storm that came through and flooded the streets and knocked out the power for almost 24 hours.  We had some water in the house and sent a good amount of time cleaning up.

I also have been working pretty hard on content for the new technology specific blog I am looking to launch next week.  Plus I’ve been twittering like crazy which is just a really awesome service.

I’ll be getting back on to a more normal schedule here in the next week or so since I do have some posts I want to do, but I just wanted to make sure the blogosphere knows I m still alive.

One of my favorite things about owning a house is just sitting in the backyard with my camera taking pictures of the birds and animals that are running around. Being that we’re around 2 miles from downtown, it is not exactly the Alaskan Wilderness. But we still get some neat birds and it is a nice way to pass some time.

Here’s the link to the gallery.

Recently I’ve been noticing an interesting trend. I’ve been seeing more and more entities (people, companies, movements) give out a Google “keyword” instead of a URL. For example, the Ron Paul campaign has a lot of placards that just say “Google Ron Paul” instead of just giving a website address (ie www.ronpaul2008.com).

Apparently companies in Asia have been doing this for a while now. I’m not sure if this is because of the difficulty of acquiring meaningful domain names, or if the subject is just easier to remember.

This means a couple things (to me). One is that while I don’t think premium domain names are going away anytime soon, they may definitely become less important. The other is that namespace crowding is going to be come much more of a problem.

What I mean by namespace crowding is the the inability to control how you rank in your search results. If you are the poor guy who owns Bill Gates Windows and Door Installation, you are never ever going to be able to Google that and be anywhere near the top of the search pile. A unique URL is the only choice at this point.

Your ownership of this phrase becomes even more important. Non-related pages or bad pages become much more of a problem, and one that is sort of out of your control. If the folks at boingboing decide that they want to write a post saying “Sean Lavelle is a tool” that is going to crush whatever Google ranking I have built up. That is sort of an extreme example (Cory, Mark, David and Xeni don’t do it! Please! ) but you can see who this lack of control would give someone who is invested in a particular brand fits.

What this means for me right now is that I am still pursuing a domain name that I want, but keeping an eye on how Google (and other search engines see me) is a very important part of maintaining your brand.

So go ahead - Google “Sean E Lavelle”

So in my attempt to get back into the whole social networking groove, I finally took the plunge and joined Twitter.  For those of you that don’t spend far too much of your precious lives online, Twitter is a micro-blogging service.  No images, no movies, all posts must be less then 140 characters.

I really don’t know how useful I’m going to find it, but I was really impressed that when the California wildfires flared up earlier this year, a lot of people were able to notify their families of there status via twitter (since phone lines were down).  Now I know there is absolutely no way that I will be able to get my parents to ever go near or use something like twittter, so I needed a way so that non twitter using people could see my twitter posts (called tweets).

After looking into some plugins, I decided that I would just publish the RSS feed to a page on the site.  So if you are looking for my most current information, it will be on the Social page.  I don’t plan to use twitter a whole bunch, but we will see where things take us.  I also set up a twitter client for my blackberry (no sms, text messaging bad!) so I can update when I not at the computer.

Since most of my friends don’t use twitter, I’m sort of in the awkward position of having no one to follow.  I had Twitter scan my email addresses and all it came back with was Penelope Trunk (of the Brazen Careerist).  It just seems weird to me to follow popular bloggers who I’ve somewhat interacted with.  Maybe I am missing the point of the whole thing though.

So if you know me and use twitter, go ahead and follow me.  If you just want to follow me and don’t know me, I’d be more then happy to expose you to my ramblings as well.  I plan to give it an honest try and see how things work out after a couple of weeks.

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!).