It is 2010 already!

Saturday the 9th of January, 2010 at 2:25 pm

Wow where on earth did 2009 go! If you are looking back through the archives on this site you might notice a fairly large gap between posts, in fact my last post was in March last year. There are a variety of reasons for this, the biggest one being that I have been working full time for a wonderful company for the last year and a bit doing front end UI development on a soon to be released web CMS.

This has been a huge change for me after so long working freelance. There have of course been positives and negatives to the changes but after a year I can honestly say that they positives far outweigh the negatives. I have had the opportunity to work on some huge projects that I would never had gotten the chance to work on 18 months ago and I have been working with some truly amazing people many of whom I now call friends. The regular pay cheque doesn’t hurt either! It is true that I can no longer work in my dressing gown but for friends, opportunity and financial security I can certainly live with that. In many ways, even though I loved working freelance and may go back to it one day, I wish that I had gone to work for a company sooner.

So why, you may ask, am I writing a blog post full of groveling excuses 10 months after my last post? I have been wanting to get back into writing blog posts more regularly and now that I have adjusted to my new 9-5.30 schedule I feel that I may be able to dedicate more time to it (don’t hold your breath in case you don’t hear from me for another 10 months!).

The new year seemed like a good time to start things back up again so I have made it a resolution (hopefully it will last longer than any others that I have ever made). I would love to make a grand proclamation about posting once a week so that I could join in with Project 52 but seeing as I haven’t posted in 10 months if I try to force myself to post once a week I worry that I would end up putting out rushed uninteresting content. I am hoping that I will be inspired to write something valuable once a week so you never know I may well get 52 or more blog posts out this year but I am not sticking my neck out and claiming that I will do it.

What does 2010 have in store for me?

So what am I going to be doing with myself that may end up being blogged about? Other than the usual list of things like ‘get fit’ and ‘see my family more’ there are some more specific things that I hope to achieve in 2010.

Blog more

As I mentioned I hope that this will be the first in a long line of regular blog posts. I have a few ideas for tutorials one of which I am hoping to get out in the next week or 2. A lot of the plans following this will involve learning and experimenting so I will be sharing as much of this as I can on the blog

Re-design this site

The design for this site has been great for me. It has been featured on a huge quantity of web sites, gotten me work and helped towards me getting my full time job. I have had many compliments through email, twitter and in person. Why then would I want to tear it up and start again? Well I don’t really. However, this site was built to promote my work and it had a blog tacked on to help with that, the focus was very much on the work. Currently, though I am still doing bits of work in the evenings and weekends, I am not actively seeking freelance work. Taking that into account I really want to make the focus more on the blog in the hope that this will encourage me to post more regularly.

As I am re-designing I am going to take the opportunity to experiment with some HTML5 and CSS3. I may also switch from Wordpress to something else, not because I now dislike Wordpress, I still love it and think that it is a wonderful platform, I just may use it as a chance to learn something new. I don’t know how successfully I will be able to drag myself away from Wordpress so this may well not happen.

I have had many requests to make the current design of this site into a Wordpress theme so you never know, if I am re-designing I may well do some polishing and improving to the code in this theme and give it out to people on here or maybe on a site like Themeforest.

Work on some personal projects

On top of blogging more on my freshly designed site I would like to spend some time putting out some of the ideas I have had for personal side projects. I think that personal projects are important for designers and developers as they give us a chance to experiment with things that we would not be able to at work or on a clients site.

I not entirely sure what these will be yet. I would like to make a site for my girlfriend who has become a keen amateur photographer in the last couple of years. There are 1 or 2 web apps that I have always thought about building but have never gotten round to it. I have been looking into iPhone development and I have some ideas for apps that I may get round to making on my own or collaborating with others on. I have no firm ideas on what I will do or what will work well enough to be released.

Misc

So all the above ones are the ones that will have any real relevance to this blog. Other than that I really need to learn to play the lovely guitar that my girlfriend bought for my birthday, I want to make more time for friends and family, and I really must get fit!

I am also planning to make a fairly big change to my life at some point hopefully this year, but I can’t talk about that just yet, I will save it for when there are firmer plans so that I have another blog post to write!

That’s all folks

Wow you made it this far! I am sure that this wasn’t a life changing read. I wrote as much for me as I did anyone else in order to start things off and to get some of my goals written down. I really hope that you had a great bit of time off over the holiday season and I look forward to sharing as much of 2010 with you as I can!

Thanks for reading