Happy blogging.

It is stupid to spend hours typing information on public websites and to then worry about keeping it private. Facebook was designed to share information. The Web was designed to make information widely available.

Deleting your Facebook account over issues of privacy is like boycotting the local grocery store because people gawk when you pull down your pants. Are you going to tell the grocery store owner that you refuse to return until he or she provides a means to control who sees your bum when your pants are down around your ankles? Or, are you going to refrain from pulling your pants down in public? Which makes more sense?

Facebook is a public place: govern yourself accordingly. Don’t be stupid! If you are having an affair, don’t talk about it on Facebook. If you lied to the boss, said that you were sick, and went golfing instead, don’t put the pictures on Facebook.

Of course, there are real privacy issues, but do not assume that nobody is watching you on the Internet. Break the word down: “Inter”, which means between, among or within; and “net”, which means to catch and ensnare. If your neighbors are laughing behind your back because they saw you naked in front of your window, it is silly to blame that on your landlord. The Internet is a public place. There are better places to be private.

Having said this, there is information that you share online, with a legal understanding that it will not be shared for any other purpose than the purpose you ascribe. That is a contract. Still, sometimes you need a contract, but other times, all you need is common sense.

I have met people who, at a young age, felt that they could learn everything they needed to know, and achieve some sort of enduring technical competence. They quickly learned that the cycle of learning and changing never ends.

This video makes a few things clear: change is massive, change is unrelenting, change is occurring on a fundamental level. Assumptions are changing. Keeping up with the technical aspects of change is hard enough, but understanding the effect and significance of it is mind bending. Let’s face it, the impact of the change is enough to knock some of us out of our orbits. I will let the video speak for itself:

If I depended on my artistic flair to earn a living, I might be in trouble. Fortunately for me, there are cheap templates, and there are designs I can imitate.

Because I have been using it for years, I have found WordPress easy to start using it as a basic CMS for some of my clients.

My favourite place to buy a template is Themeforest. I host small sites for clients who do not have big budgets. Themeforest provides attractive templates at a very affordable price. However not all themes are equal. Here are some things you should consider.

1) Read the comments. Users often post comments about themes. They contain useful info. You do not want to buy a theme that has problems and issues, and you especially do not want to buy a theme from a designer who does not respond to that are raised problems.

2) Buy a well supported theme if you can. At ThemeForest, at least one designer has posted training screen casts.

3) If you are buying a theme for a client, buy cautiously. Themeforest displays the number of times a theme has been sold. I prefer themes by designers who have made number of sales. Also, I tend to choose themes by designers who have posted multiple themes that I can also check out.

4) Ensure that your theme is web standards compliant. There are tools you can use to check the template before you buy it. Read about this subject to learn more.

5) Use the theme preview and look at the CSS files. Do the CSS files contain useful comments? Can you figure out how the CSS corresponds to the pages you see? If you need to customize the template, you may have to work with these files. Don’t buy yourself grief. Buy templates the employ some CSS best practices.

6) And, finally, it never hurts to have a good book to help you alter the template, or to add functionality. I depend on Smashing WordPress, but there are others. And, of course, there is a lot of information available online.

7) Do not buy a template just for how it looks. Be smart. Buy something you can support and change with ease. Buy something that provides good functionality. Buy something that saves you and your clients headaches.

However, I have bigger plans than that. For five years, I have blogged about whatever I pleased and I have created a haphazard collection of categories to classify my content. Now, I want to blog strategically, and I need to create tags and categories that help drive traffic to this site. I am also beginning to work with clients to show them how to do the same.

Today, I deleted useless categories, and I began to think about what I want to achieve by blogging. In short:

• I need to know what I want to achieve.
• I need to prepare to measure my success.
• I need to measure my success, and course correct as necessary.

I am going to delete more categories, and tags. Then, I will create new categories and tags, and I will apply them to my old content as I see fit. This blog needs focus. This is happening after the fact, but it is never too late.

The first part of the exercise is about branding, I guess. Strategy, for me, is about knowing what you want to achieve, identifying the resources you have at your disposal , and planning how to use them to achieve your end. My blog is a resource.

If you are impatient, like me, follow the steps I outline below, and you can stop reading here.

First things first: get the book. You can purchase the PDF of the Definitive Guide to Jython by clicking on the image of the book that appears above. Or, you can view a preview that is available at Google Books.

Last, but not least, there is also an open source version of the book. I will refer to this version in my examples, but, if you own the book, follow along.

I suggest that you download Aptana and install PyDev – that is the IDE I will be using in my examples. Since Aptana is based on Eclipse, you also have the option of installing the PyDev plugin in your current Eclipse Install.

I am going to assume that you have Java running on your machine, but I will provide instructions for the other steps. So, just to keep things easy, to get started follow these steps:

Get the software.

1. Install Jython on your machine.
2. Get Pydev running on your machine. (As part of Aptana, or as an Eclipse plugin.)
3. Get the latest version of DB4O for Java.

Bookmark the useful resources:

1. The Definitive Guide to Jython
2. The PyDev Documentation
3. The DB4O Documentation

You are free to bookmark these resources any way you please, but I am fond of Delicious because I can access my links from anywhere, because there is a Delicious API and because there are some cool plugins for Firefox and Google Chrome that make it more fun to use the service.

Get this done, and move on to part 2 when I have written it.

However, the truth is that open source is also about loving or caring about people. Today, I want to feature a Firefox extension that I have been using for a while now. I even recommend it to others: FireFTP. This is a great little tool that works from any Firefox browser, and gives you the ability to upload and download files from other servers using FTP.

The tool is free, but you are invited to donate funds to keep the project going. Half of all proceeds go towards helping various orphanages in Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina and in Vukovar, Croatia. Isn’t that something?

The writer of the software also encourages users of his software to volunteer in their own community. He is definitely using open source to make the world a better place for people.

To start using the FireFTP Firefox extension today, goto the Firefox addon site.

But, where is the Internet going? What kind of a world are we creating as we write code?

This article, by Tim O’Reilly, is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the latest trends.

This is the playing field, as Tim sees it. This is the ground companies are fighting to occupy. This is what their strategies address, and what their tactics are about.

Happy reading.

Today, I am launching a new look, based on a dependable template from Elegant Themes. What it lacks in bells and whistles, it makes up for by being clean, efficient, easy to manage and html compliance.

Last week, I turned fifty. Wow! I wrote my first line of code in 1977, and I have owned a personal computer since 1982. I still love programming, and I am still excited about new things. So, I am going to blog some more. If I play it right, my career is going to change course this year.

I face the following challenges:

1. I am aging – I rarely work with programmers my own age.
2. Consulting with government clients is not as challenging as I would like.
3. My work has stopped being fun.
4. I see no chance to achieve anything worthwhile doing what I am doing.

It is no secret that I identify with Don Quixote – I even named my bike Rocinante, after his horse. So, it’s time to find an adventure. Let us go, Sancho. My enemies are not as imaginary as they seem.

First, I am going to reorganize and purge some of content, and create some new categories.

Many people in the so-called enterprise do not take what I do seriously. There are two trends that I find silly. First, there is the plethora of books that promise that you can become proficient with any computer language or technology in just 21 days. Give me break! Read what Peter Norvig had to say in a very good article entitled Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

The other trend is expensive training that cannot possible provide much value. Training dollars are being wasted. There are companies who send employees off on four day courses to learn how to program in .NET, for example. These courses can cost $2,500 or more per person. What can you learn in four days? Really? One such course actually states: “Prior programming experience is helpful but not required.” Again, give me a break!

As Novig writes: “There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.”