A happy new year to all of you. Here’s to another interesting year filled with exciting challenges. In spite of all the economic, environmental and political issues in 2008, I think it was a thrilling year. I hope, and it seems pretty likely, that 2009 will be the year of change. The people need it and earth might need it even more.
Personally, I have much more humble goals and resolutions. My most important goal for the first quarter is finishing my home renovation. It’s about time, so this takes precedence over all other goals. But don’t fear, I have a lot of good intentions for the blog and my sites. I haven’t really made them very concrete (SMART) yet, because I will have to think about them for a little longer. I might make some Groundhog Day resolutions.
Here’s what I currently have in mind for my sites:
- The basic idea for next year is that I’d really make my sites self-sustaining. I plan to find a way to pay at least my hosting bills. And if possible, I would like to upgrade to a better hosting account. My Lunarpages basic hosting plan has served me well, but I could do with something speedier. I certainly won’t be adding more advertising. Right now, this is the maximum, but I might move some things around, I don’t know yet.
- One thing I have planned is to clean the site up and make it more accessible. A blog is great for content that goes out of style in a few days, but I have a lot of interesting things in the archives that deserve a little more exposure. It’s something that other bloggers are also struggling with. As a first step, I’ve already categorized every post in one of 7 categories.
- It might proof impossible, but I’d like to get a little more into social networks. I like StumbleUpon a lot (feel free to send me a friend request) so I’ll probably start using this a little more intensive. I also like Plurk, but it appears most people have picked Twitter, so I’ll probably get myself TweetDeck and start tweeting away. The time this required might come out of a reduced Google reader subscription count. I’m still figuring out how to go about that.
- I would like to add a 3rd post every week. Maybe something with video or a podcast. I might move the techie tutorials to a videocast and change the focus of my long posts a bit to more newsworthy, general things that appeal to a larger audience. Don’t worry, I don’t intend to write solely linkbait and listposts from now on. But before I can get started with video I still need to set up a usable production environment. My two previous videos took too much time post-producing.
- And finally, I may or may not make my hobby sites a bit more professional. Until now, I have treated them as tech demos, but it appears there might be interest from enough people to expand them a bit and give them a more professional appearance.
Not related to this site: but I plan to sort through a tremendous amount of old media (floppy disks, tapes, CD’s even cassettes) I have lying around in a corner. You might see some stuff popping up now and then.
And because you’ve read this far, here’s a little gift that will keep you busy for a long time.