Panes of Glass

As any loyal reader of this blog can attest, I continually mull over whether or not maintaining a blog is a worthy pursuit. I’ve gone on hiatus three times for several months to a year and even posted that said post was my last. I don’t do this because I have nothing to say; I rather find myself posting elsewhere in a forum or commenting on other blogs. The real battle is whether or not I should post my thoughts and contributions on my own site or on others’.

At this point, I’ve likely lost most of my readers who are here for one thing or another, except those interested in the topics in the title. And that proves the point, in the end. A personal blog is basically a lot of thoughts, asides, commentaries, etc. about a variety of topics with only one common theme: they are all about the blogger. While that may appeal to some people in some cases, generally the only people who read this are close friends and family, and that happens only so often. (On rare occasions, I’m pleasantly surprised by new visitors and contacts… Thanks!) Please also note that I’m not directing this at corporate blogs or blogs about one or a few closely related concepts.

Instead of such a personal blog (this one is a case-in-point), I’ve been thinking that the only reason to post publicly is to share what I’ve got. If no one reads it, however, then what good was posting it? And if I’m inconsistent or post on certain ideas only infrequently, how will anyone know or care when I’ve posted exactly what they’ve needed for days–here I’m alluding to the difficulty of finding good SharePoint development resources–when it’s my second post on the topic in six months? If I post on MSDN or SitePoint forums, however, not only will a lot of people likely see it, but I may even be able to discuss other ways of doing what I’ve suggested or even learn ways to improve.

I’ve come full circle once again. Why have a blog? I really can’t think of a good reason. However, I can think of a really great reason for continuing to use WordPress and maintain a personal site: a personal site can act as a hub for all of my online activities and accounts, and at some point, potentially bring all the posts I contribute elsewhere back here for a central picture of what I do online. (Of course, sites like Twine and Facebook already do that on some level, but there’s nothing like having your own, decrufted domain name!)

The only problem, at this point, is that WordPress does not tie into the Semantic Web at the moment. This is changing with goodies like BuddyPress, SparqlPress, wp-openid, etc. I’m most excited about SparqlPress, which will really tie WordPress into the Semantic Web by pulling user information from FOAF profiles using SPARQL queries (see the example).

However, even with these great steps forward, I’m still missing something. WordPress is a personal publishing platform, but it doesn’t publish semantic data in the form that can be used to link to data on other sites. What I want to do is create a plugin to allow WordPress to embed RDF metadata into every post, page and link on my site using standard rules. I’ve started evaluating which content type works best for various types of data (see my list of “Online Accounts” links in the sidebar). At some point I’ll figure out
how to pull my content elsewhere back into my personal feed (i.e. “blog”), but that’ll remain for a later task.

Anyway, I’ll probably keep posting some stuff here, but it’ll really be thoughts that don’t seem to be better posted elsewhere. Over time, this site will start really looking like a hub about me and less like a blog… but I’ve said similar things before…

Tagged as blogging, foaf, linked data, rdf, rdfa, semantic web, SPARQL, WordPress + Categorized as Software