Beau Lebens — the real life person
I’m an Australian “web guy” who moved to the US in search of the big technology industry that is Silicon Valley. I live in San Francisco now, and am continually reminded of how glad I am to be here, in amongst the heart of so many exciting things that are going on online.
I’ve been working in the web industry since ‘96, I guess that makes me a veteran or something — or just makes me sound old :-). Here’s a picture (right) so that you have a face to put to the name. If you see me at a convention or meetup or something come and say hi, or tell me I’m a geek and I shouldn’t put my picture on the Intarwebs.
When I’m not sitting in front of a computer screen (2 actually), I’m an active student of Krav Maga, an Israeli self-defense system. I currently hold an Green belt (Level 4), and usually practice 4 times a week. Being in San Francisco, there are loads of things I should be doing outside, such as all the Bay Area hiking, biking, water sports etc recommended by Weekend Sherpa, but I don’t get around to that as much as I’d like!
Currently I divide my time between working on MyBabyOurBaby.com, which I built with Ray Hernandez and freelance consulting. If you’re interested in having me do some consulting work for you, then please check out my resume (or just get in touch).
Beau Lebens — the digital identity
Although I don’t heavily use a lot of these anymore, you’ll find profiles or bits and pieces of my digital identity at the following sites (once DiSo gains traction I can shift it all back here… right?). Combined, they capture a lot of my digital footsteps (or just provide an account where I want to be able to comment etc).
The Company/Website
I registered the business name Dented Reality in Australia in 1998 and consulted under that title for a while (side-work, while also working full-time). I registered the dentedreality.com.au domain for the first time in ‘98 as well. Unfortunately dentedreality.com was registered by someone else immediately thereafter, and has been re-registered continuously since then (I’d love to get it!).
This site is powered by WordPress, which is an amazingly flexible piece of software. I make use of my own custom theme based off the semantically-sexy Sandbox Theme, and a collection of plugins, listed below. I hand-craft my CSS and JavaScript (jQuery) using the TextMate editor on a MacBook Pro. The site runs on DreamHost.
- SmartLinks (v. 1.0) by AdaptiveBlue.
- Akismet (v. 2.2.3) by Matt Mullenweg.
- Digg This (v. 1.0.4) by Aviran Mordo.
- Exploration Tools (v. 0.1) by Beau Lebens.
- FeedBurner FeedSmith (v. 2.3) by FeedBurner.
- Flickr Manager (v. 2.1) by Trent Gardner.
- Get Recent Comments (v. 2.0.2) by Krischan Jodies.
- Google XML Sitemaps (v. 3.1.2) by Arne Brachhold.
- Gravatar Shortcode (v. 1.0) by Beau Lebens.
- IntenseDebate (v. 2.0.18) by IntenseDebate & Crowd Favorite.
- MediaRSS (v. 1.1.3) by Andy Skelton.
- MobilePress (v. 1.0.3) by Younique.
- One Click Plugin Updater (v. 2.4.4) by Janis Elsts.
- OpenID (v. 3.1.4) by DiSo Development Team.
- Platinum SEO Pack (v. 1.2.3) by Rajesh - Techblissonline Dot Com.
- Plugins list (v. 0.2.2) by Davide Benini.
- RSS List (v. 2.0) by Beau Lebens.
- Search Excerpt (v. 1.2 $Rev: 19 $) by Scott Yang.
- Search Meter (v. 2.3) by Bennett McElwee.
- Search Reloaded (v. 2.11) by Denis de Bernardy.
- ShareThis (v. 2.3) by ShareThis and Crowd Favorite (crowdfavorite.com).
- SimplePie Core (v. 1.1.1) by Ryan Parman and Geoffrey Sneddon.
- Sociable (v. 3.0.2) by Joost de Valk.
- Subscribe To Comments (v. 2.1.2) by Mark Jaquith.
- TinyMCE Advanced (v. 3.2) by Andrew Ozz.
- Twitter Tools (v. 1.5.1a) by Alex King.
- WordPress Database Backup (v. 2.2.2) by Austin Matzko.
- WP-CodePress (v. 1.0) by bobef.
- WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition (v. 1.1) by Blogging Expertise.
- WP-DownloadManager (v. 1.31) by Lester 'GaMerZ' Chan.
- WP Super Cache (v. 0.8.6) by Donncha O Caoimh.
- WYSINWYG (v. 0.1) by Beau Lebens.
- XRDS-Simple (v. 1.0) by DiSo Development Team.
