Monday kicked off the new Viva La Bands tour for CKY, with the first stop being Rams Head in Baltimore, MD. I attended the event to hang out with my buddies. Despite equipment issues with Deron’s amp, the first show went great. After the show we hung out on the tour bus, checked out some material they are working on and Matty Cole told some funny tour stories. I also got to meet the keyboardist for Clutch, another great rock band who originated in Germantown, MD.

If you are unfamiliar with the band, here are two music videos of theirs. “Sink into the Underground” and “Close Yet Far” (respectively), both off of their 2003 release “Infiltrate.Destroy.Rebuild”.

Their new album (to be titled) is due in early 2008.

Sink into the Underground:

Close Yet Far:

For those of you on the Delmarva Peninsula, CKY will be coming around again on October 31st for a show at the Electric Factory, in Philadelphia, PA.

To see all their tour dates, please visit:

http://www.ckyalliance.com/events/index.cfm

As a continuation of the post I created a couple days ago, I’d like to share this article with you written by the folks over at mint.com which reinforces some of the basic concepts I stated in my post. Like I said, protecting your online privacy is very important and should be taken seriously by newbies or veterans of the internet when you submit any information on the web.

From mint.com:

According to a recent report by the San Jose Mercury News, Sophos, a Boston-based Internet security company, was able to acquire highly personal information from 40% of the nearly 200 Facebook users who chose to add “Freddi Staur” as a friend in their Facebook accounts. Freddi Staur doesn’t exist, except as a toy on the desk of some Sophos employee. The company created a fictional person on Facebook to illustrate how vulnerable people can be when using social networks.

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For the past 2 years, I have been using various blog platforms on the internet (such as LiveJournal, Blogger, Wordpress, and a slew of others that didn’t quite make it) and in client project developments for Inclind. I even use one for my own personal site/playground, built with Wordpress.

But recently, I took a step back and said, why Wordpress? Is it really that great?

Lets look at the reasons why I chose to integrate Wordpress into websites as a way of content management / blogging:

1. Simple to use.

2. Not hard to learn.

3. Allows non-internet types to jump in and start writing without having to program anything.

When I thought about it, are these really perks at all? Especially since I am an application developer? In retrospect, I feel like a lazy developer for bringing Wordpress into play for client projects, despite the fact I hooked it in well and made it work for them. But, you know what they say about hindsight.

That was then, this is now.

Thankfully, I am a better developer now than I was back then, and decided to code my own blogging solution that would be open ended enough for our needs that it could be deployed quickly into existing sites as well as ones under development. Since our web applications are powered by Coldfusion, and Wordpress is entirely in PHP, it creates a headache when trying to use Wordpress on a non PHP site. The reason being, you can’t run Coldfusion code in a php file, and vice versa, so it creates more overhead when integrating it into our Coldfusion applications and adds difficulty in extending site functions and maintaining all the code.

I thought, hell, why not just recreate Wordpress, take out what you don’t really need, and keep it streamlined? After doing some planning and whiteboarding, it occurred to me that creating a solution would be rather simple, and in just 5 days, I had built a blogging platform that is good enough for most people to use. I concluded that blog only needs a few core things: the content, the attributes (date, author, views), and ability to comment. This is all the user needs to conduct a blog. Other things like search engine optimization can be handled by the developer. The user does not need this headache, especially those that are not internet-savvy. What I mean is that our system will generate the appropriate data to gain search engine rank, aggregate feeds so people may add that blog content to their site, block spambots and other such features that the average user shouldn’t have to concern themselves with.

Wordpress does allow for theme switching though. But, that is just a feature for people without a website, and the templates available for it are rather bland. Thankfully, we have the two best graphic designers in all of Delmarva, Jason Steagall and Tom Brown, that can cook up beautiful websites in their sleep. This allows us to give customers exactly what they want without problems. Other companies tend to get templates from sweatshops like templatemonster.com, charge a ton of money, and force poor coding into these designs. Not Inclind. We build a custom solution each and every time, and thus is the basis of me dropping Wordpress as an offering.

Remarkably, I was able to get this done in just a week and ready to use. We have a lot of upcoming sites that are already using this feature, and I am quite proud of what I was able to achieve in just a short time. From a user perspective, I can tell you that around 80% of blogging platform features are simply not necessary. In other words, blog administration intranets are more complicated than they really need to be. By taking all of this away and leaving in what you do need, you will get more out of your blog and website that you can imagine, and have fun doing it. All you have to do is post, our system handles the rest. It will update itself to search engines, manage comments, block spammers, and everything else that makes blogging worthwhile all on its own. It is also 100% customizable from our perspective, should a user want to customize our platform even more, which I/we are happy to do.

Don’t believe me? Simply go to google.com and type in my name, Kevin Quillen. I come up in nearly 75% of the results on the first 5 pages. Now just imagine what we can do for your site with the blogging platform I just built, or our other web applications that include this function. After just a few months of tinkering, my site shot to the top of the list. Your site can be at the top too.

We offer free consultations for any project you have in mind. Call Inclind, Inc at (302) 856-2802 today and ask how we can help YOU.

I was a little late to this blog mania that seems to be sweeping our society. But once I began, I never looked back. I started my foray into the realm of blogging with Yahoo! 360. I’m nearing 1000 blog posts there after being an active blogger for a bit over a year.

It’s really quite amazing how social networking technologies like this are shrinking the world. I’ve got friends in Japan, New Zealand, The Philippines, and Bosnia-Herzegovina… and every place in between. It’s interesting how we attract like minds, kindred spirits, from the vast pool of humanity that is finding its place in an online world.

I suppose there are nearly as many reasons to blog as there are people who blog. Some use it as online journals, some to spread knowledge, teaching and opinions, others blog to rant. We walk, we talk, we dance, we blog.

So, blogging, to me, is like any other form of communication. We communicate what we believe, feel, care about, are interested in, and occasionally, someone who shares our worldview finds it. And we share, and we join, and we blog….