BarCampOrlando is an opportunity for the Central Florida tech crowd to finally come together.

At BarCamp people from diverse groups, comprising of developers, designers, bloggers, and people that just plain love the web, can get together to share information, talk, and have a good time. It’s events like this that spur discussion to shape the future of the net, which makes BarCamp one of the most exciting conferences to attend. Best of all, it’s free and open discussion is encouraged, if not required!

My first BarCamp was in Jacksonville, and that’s where realized how serious blogging is thanks to presentations by Josh Hallet and Joey Marchy. I want to reiterate that this is just as much about ideas and discussion than presentations on specific technologies.

We have tons of great local user groups here in Orlando, for Ruby, Java, .NET, PHP, Adobe, Linux, Ubuntu, Creatives, and probably some things I’m forgetting. Additionally, the similar Refresh06 conference was a blast. I think we have an extraordinary opportunity to create an amazing event, so show your support by blogging about it and putting badges on your sites! Without blogging and your help, events like this don’t happen.

I’ll end this with a video explaining BarCamp and its history… see you there!

I’ve blogged about my gripes with multiple blogs in the past, concluding with an informal protest to only use one.

A specific instance of the problem that I mentioned was having a personal blog in addition to blogging under a company. Well, it turns out that you can have the best of both worlds with little to no effort.

Yahoo Pipes takes advantage of the fact that so many sites and services distribute some form of feed syndication. It allows you interact with feeds from different sources in an absolutely incredible amount of ways. Through graphically playing “connect-the-dots” with various modules and/or filters, you gain an unprecedented amount of easily accessible power to create mashup feeds. Of course you can export these to RSS (or JSON), but they even offer email or mobile exports!… and publicly sharing the “source” file so others can copy your project where you left off and continue it!

Okay enough fanaticism (although it is completed warranted), and lets get back to the topic. Grabbing feeds from separate employee blogs to combine on a company blog has always been an option. However, Pipes makes this so easy that you have no excuse to not use it.

Here’s a simple proof-of-concept… totally usable though. It uses the “fetch feed” module that you pass an RSS url to. Then, the sort module is used to sort for the most recent entries by date published, and even by new blog comments. And then… nope that’s it, just connect to the “pipe output” module and you’re done!
(Note that I only included my blog here in the RSS, but you can add as many as you want to get mixed in by just hitting the “plus” icons):
http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=3PcgeID42xGTQKjsy6ky6g

Another cool thing you could do is make a filter to only grab posts out of the feeds to put on the company blog that have been posted under a certain category… sweet!

I just recently got Eric Allam to give me his blog URL, and I love his site design at last100meters. In trying to come up with a design for the project I’m working on, my aim is to strike a balance between minimalism and a flashy web 2.0 look, while still being unique and useful UI-wise.

Eric’s site definitely appeals to the minimalist in me though, and is the first that I’ve liked a lot since Google’s homepage. The posts/titles are big, prominent, and pure text, spanning the whole left pane down the page. Three links, the RSS feed, Google Reader shares, and Twitter feed are the only things with images, even then being tiny. White space is everywhere, and his contact information is immediately available. I love it!

In contrast, you can tell from my blog design that I like to just take everything I have ever touched and throw it all together… now that’s art =p

Whether or not to commit to other blogs has been bothering me for a while now. I started with this blog… When I had a job at New Media (seems their site is down right now, how ironic =), I was assigned another blogging account. It started there, I had to make decisions between what I considered better suited for my personal blog or my work blog. This type of thing is especially hard for a web developer, as the divide between personal and work related activities is hazy at best.

I never ended up using that account, and didn’t post here either because of never knowing where to post. Later, I was offered to blog Ruby and Rails specific stuff with the guys at Rails Envy. Although they are both great dudes whom I respect, for some reason I couldn’t get myself to say yes.

We were also thinking about how it might be cool to have a Rails/Ruby dev blog for PayPerPost. You know, get a bunch of developers all blogging in the same place about cool stuff we come up with daily. Yet again, that would mean splitting content between this blog and another (can you see what I mean about a developers work/play divide being slim?)

Just today I was asked whether I wanted to be apart of a neat idea for a Ruby blog with my friend/coworker Eric…

As I hinted in my last post and my latest rockstartup confessional (doesn’t seem to be online yet, wait for it!), I am spending my spare time working on an awesome site to help people blog more (solving my own problems here, heh) and pump quality content into the web via microformats. Of course, I have to be cool and make a company blog for that, right?

Nope, I say all this worry and frustration ends here. I am making the decision now to devote all my time and effort blogging to this site. No more distractions, no more stress, and much more learning and content. I’m not sure if I’m the only one running into this problem, but if you felt anything like dejavu reading this I invite you to do the same.

My goal with this blog will be to make exactly one post per day, always learning or reflecting on something new.