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…

• Heroku for Ruby on Rails development
• Photoshop Express for image editing and sharing
• WordPress 2.5 for even more powerful blogging and now speedy image galleries
• Twine for linking your tagged based information together (M. David Peterson has had some very interesting blog posts about Twine recently.)
• Woopra for real-time site management that you have to see to believe; Google Analytics, eat your heart out!

See below for some interesting screenshots:

In addition, my friend Randy Hoyt and I each got to talk with Matt one-on-one, and we both came away excited about doing things that might help WordPress grow in the future. I am planning to start working on a plug-in for including RDFa in WordPress (similar to Drupal‘s announcement), and Randy is wanting to build a issue tracker. This all leads to WordPress being far more than just a blogging application; it really is a full stack application platform.

Kudos to the WordPress contributors and all who worked so hard to put this WordCamp together. Thanks also to the City of Frisco, TX, our hosts. Their council chamber, where the event was held, was very nice and comfortable. All in all, it was terrific, and well worth the drive from Houston to Dallas. If you are interested, several people were taking video, which may turn up somewhere. Just search for wordcampdallas2008, and you should get lucky. Also, Nathan Rice had a nice summary, as did John P. from OneMansBlog.com and Lorelle.

I am more familiar with the idea of Microsoft’s .NET platform, Ruby on Rails, Django, CakePHP, symfony, Prototype, etc. as real development frameworks. These are just a few of the myriad frameworks coming out these days. One might say that programming is now going to two camps–the true coders who come up with the frameworks and those that only use these frameworks for their apps. Nothing wrong with the latter, but can you really be considered a programmer when you are simply stringing together someone else’s code? But I digress….

Anyway, the interesting thing is that the only difference between a highly configurable web application like Drupal or WordPress and a framework like Ruby on Rails is that with the former, you are given an example application out of the box, and you’re encouraged to stick somewhat close to the original design and intent. With Rails or symfony, you are given a blank piece of paper and some really great tools. However, those tools keep you somewhat closed in to all the possibilities. If you want to go outside of the intent of the framework, you still have to extend it.

This is really no different than the modular and themed nature of the afore-mentioned open source web apps. I think it really becomes a matter of preference. If you are a tinkerer, you’ll probably do better to stick with WordPress or Drupal, figure out how to make it conform to your designs, and you’re done. I like this, but I’m much more likely to want to start with the blank sheet of paper. I just like the agony and the ecstasy of building things from scratch.

Just ask my friend Randy Hoyt. I have been on WordPress for years now as a “temporary solution” as I build my great authoring platform (still WordPress). He took WordPress, loved it, and made it look like nothing I’d ever seen. In the end, they’re all frameworks.

So I’m giving that up and sticking with WordPress. Let’s face it, it’s one of the best and easiest to use applications out there for blogging, and despite my earlier protests, that’s what I’m doing. I still want to add a menu bar for my pages instead of using another listing on the sidebar, but I’m not going to worry to much about that just now.

I also got Gallery 2 installed and embedded into WordPress using WPG2, so you can see all of my pictures without having to “leave” my site. I’m really excited about that! It was the hardest part of finishing off my current look. It also makes inserting pictures into my blog much easier.

Finally, I’m making use of the newest WordPress feature: widgets. These are draggable sidebar items that let you organize and order the sidebar any way you like. You can even create your own in almost no time! It’s a real treat and definitely makes customizing the site that much easier.