AbeOlson.com

As has recently been much discussed and debated, the Facebook’s Open Graph reveals plainly what has been known by some for a while: Businesses want to own your online identity.

Why? Because they can make money with it. Facebook, being a private corporation, becomes more valuable the more everyone interacts through its channels. With Open Graph, it has taken a bold step forward and declared that the You on the internet is owned by it.

Perhaps you’re ok with this. I’m not. You could quit Facebook entirely. I’ve chosen instead to reduce the access and information it has about me, and I will be interacting via the web in a different way than Facebook desires in the future.

If you’d like to begin disconnecting your online self with Facebook, I recommend this article on how to manage your online self settings. Unfortunately, FB is making it difficult to manage even your own information on the internet. I will be trying to stay ahead of the curve on this, while still mantaining the real benefits that FB and other social networking sites provide. My small diatribe against it’s recent developments is on the main page of this site, and it is reprinted below:

• Inspired after thinking about some of the concepts presented in “You are not a gadget” I am reducing my agreement with the modern web to wait for a more human iteration. My involvement in LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook is thus diminishing. I do want to to see the web to be a means for people to connect, to interact, and to share life, but I don’t want corporate entities dictating the terms of those relationships.
• I encourage others to examine the reductionist form applied to people on such sites; are you really a list of your favorite books and changes in status? Is that what you want the social web to reflect?
• You can learn more about me here on this site, and I’ll be redirecting most of the “social networking” sites to here. If you’d like to contact me, my email is readily available and on the left side of this page.
• Glory to God, this web allows brand new things and a new ways to interact as humans, but let’s make it what we want.

I will be attempting to update as I learn more about this, and I am awaiting the response and efforts that produce a truly open web that reflects the way human beings want to interact.

If you’re visiting abeolson.com, you may notice some changes in the scenery. I’m developing my first wordpress theme, based off a design inspiration from BenGillbanks.com. I started with Kubrick, cut a bunch out, added a bunch of my own and borrowed from else where to assemble this theme, dubbed SimpleCity. Since the main push, I’ve been tweaking here and there for the past few weeks, and by now most of the main styling is complete. There are still a few color inconsistencies, and the comments need some help, but other than that the theme is working out alright. It’s hard to get everything right when I don’t have much time or experience. Also, I’ve been developing purely in Firefox3, so I have no idea what it will look like on other browsers.
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I recently decided to add a tumblelog to my website, and found it not to be a trivial thing to incorporate into a Wordpress site. For those who may be interested, here are some brief instructions on how I set it up on this website.

What I wanted to accomplish
I wanted to have two tabs on my website, one that has the main blog, and the other which would show my Tumblr posts. I also wanted to have two separate feeds.

Step 1: Set up your Tumblr account

Go on over to Tumblr and set up an account. Put up a couple posts for good measure so that later on you’ll be able to see if things are working right. I’m using the bookmarklet they supply in the “goodies” section to post to a Tumblr account. (more…)

I found out about Tumblr a little while ago, and decided recently to try and incorporate it into this website. Tumblr is an application that allows you to “micro-blog”, or as it has now been dubbed, tumblelog.

A tumblelog (or tlog) is a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary. (source: wikipedia)

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I’ve just used Wordpress to set up two websites. I had been using Wordpress for the blog portion of abeolson.com. Just recently, you may have noticed that the site has been updated (e.g. color, slightly changed layout, still doesn’t work perfectly in IE6/7). Now, all pages–the links in the top navbar–are run through Wordpress’s Pages. So, whenever I want to make changes or add pages to the site, all I need to do is login into the wordpress admin portion, and never even worry about uploading the new changes/pages.

Polymer-Specialties is another website I just finished putting up that uses Wordpress as the content management system (CMS). By using Wordpress, it’s really easy to go and update the site as changes are made without having to know anything about ftp clients, html or css. It’s great for setting up for a small business that just wants a simple website with the easy ability to go and edit anything in the future.

Both sites use modified versions of Jack’s SybmimDX Wordpress theme. One is of the standard, the other of the ‘ghost remix’. Both have been fun to modify to fit to what I was looking for.