New Year’s Resolutions // Project 52

Categories:

Blogging, ExpressionEngine, Freelancing, Personal, The Site

Tags:

2009, 2010, clients, expressionengine, new year, project52, sxsw

Published:

4:39pm on Tuesday 5th January, 2010

Perhaps I should feel bad that last year’s “Resolutions” post is still languishing in my Drafts folder, not so much unfinished as barely started. But 2009 kept me so busy that I barely had time to think, let alone blog. That is something I intend to change in 2010.

2009

Last year was the first working directly for the Amsterdam office at Booking.com, and the regular travel that entails means that my carbon footprint has taken on Sasquatch-like proportions. I also managed to squeeze in a third trip to South By South West in March, and a holiday in the Lake District before it all went under water.

2009 was also my busiest freelance year ever, although (happily) that actually meant fewer actual clients. Working with other local freelancers like Digital Spoke and Creative Freedom meant I could concentrate on what I do best - which, this year, has been exclusively ExpressionEngine development. I even managed to make it to the first ever EECI conference in Leiden in October, where I met old friends and took far too many notes.

2010 Resolutions

• Less freelance work. While I’ve definitely learned a lot about what ExpressionEngine can do this year, and the extra money has been nice, I’m going to try to cut down on freelance work this year to spend more time with my family and on projects around the house.
• Get fit. A side-effect of spending all my time in front of a computer has been a general deterioration in my health - this year will be spent getting back in something resembling shape. Of course, being a geek this may involve gadgets and web apps; more on this topic when I start my Geek’s Guide To Getting Fit later this month.
• Update this site. Not a redesign, but this site badly needs some attention. It’s still running EE 1.6.5 for God’s sake! When I launched it last January I had a to-do list of remaining tasks that has only grown as I’ve neglected it in favour of paying work.
• Less travel. No SXSW for me this year, and probably no conferences other than work ones.

And finally on the list of New Year’s resolutions…

Project 52

My friend and talented artist Anton Peck launched Project 52 late last year. From the site:

Project 52 is a personal challenge geared toward getting fresh content on your website. The goal is to write at least one new article per week for one year.

If you ignore the flurry of activity in October following my trip to the EECI conference, I only managed a paltry seventeen posts last year, so this year I’ll be joining over 600 other people and writing a lot more on this blog as my contribution to Project 52. I already have several juicy ideas lined up for you lucky people, including a complete rewrite of my simple PHP shopping cart script so I have somewhere to direct the people who still send me weekly support request emails over five years after I wrote the damn thing. (And massive congratulations to Anton for kick-starting this project. Over 600 people - that’s more than thirty-thousand new pieces of content!)

So that’s the plan

Less work, more exercise, less travel, more writing.

I’m quite looking forward to 2010.