Answer at twtpoll

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Short, honest and to the point. The last 5 months have been an epic fail for me in terms of my mid-year resolutions and personal goals. I’m not going to go back through them or explain the multitude of things that had to take priority this year. Suffice to say, I did not achieve what I intended and that needs to change.

I’ve Succeeded

2009 has not been a complete failure. In 12 months in our new home we have completely refitted the bathroom & replaced leaky plumbing, had the entire house rewired, redecorated the lounge, almost finished redecorating & updating the kitchen and organised for the windows and doors to be replaced as needed. I’ve also succeeded in my first year of employment, and to top it off after 5 years of engagement I have finally (finally) booked my wedding, huzzah!

The Future

This year I have published 24 articles, but I have 20 drafts sitting waiting to be given some TLC and a click on the publish button. There’s no point in updating goals I haven’t achieved yet, but I certainly need a plan of action if I’m going to succeed with this blog. To stop the house and wedding from taking over my life entirely in 2010, I am going to have to get organised.

I have a weapon up my sleeve for this one: my shiny new iPhone. It pains me that I’m pinning my hopes on an Apple product, but such is life. I’ve organised all my contacts and events into Google Mail and Calendar and am using Google Sync to magically sync all that info with my iPhone. Now all I need is a ToDo list application that does the same syncing magic. I’m having to move away from my online favourite todoist because none of the iPhone apps seem to work (I paid £2.99 to find that out!). I’m planning to try out Toodledo but any recommendations would be graciously received!

I’m also loving the WordPress app for the iPhone. It is letting me regain those minutes wasted whilst dinner cooks or the kettle boils and use them towards getting one of those draft articles published. There’s plenty more to be said about the iPhone, but I’ll save that for another blog post.

So that’s it from me for 2009, it’s been a toughy. Here’s to an organised 2010 that’s rich in blog content!

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As my last post explained, I’ve had my house rewired and since redecorated. I had to pack my computer up in a box for 3 weeks (shock horror) whilst this was done, meaning I had little access to work on my blog articles. Since the redecorating has been finished I have had a lot of joint pain, and have now been diagnosed with Inflammatory Arthritis. This means that the amount of typing I can do in a day is governed by the pain in my hands :(

However I do have some bits of good news! Firstly, YUI Javascript Carousel Part 3 is in the works and should be published in a few days. Secondly, Part 3 was going to be the last article in the series but I now also have material for a fourth, and potentially a fifth article. Finally, I will shortly be receiving a copy of the forthcoming Symfony book “Symfony 1.3 Web Application Development” which I will reviewing along with some potential goodies!

In summary, there is plenty of good stuff in the works, but it’s unfortunately taking me longer to get it done. So please bare with me and keep watching this space!

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1. Get Fit

   • jog steadily for 30 minutes

   I haven’t been for a jog in several weeks. Rugby takes up a couple of hours twice a week, and I haven’t yet found the motivation to go for a jog on top of this. I am getting fitter and healthier, I just need to go for a jog and see how I’m doing with my goal.

2. Conquer Javascript

   • Write my own application from scratch
   • Become familiar with at least one Javascript library

   So far I’ve had very little free time to dedicate to this cause, however work has provided me with some opportunity to get familiar with YUI. I feel like I’ve had quite a breakthrough, and goal no. 2 is certainly going well. Therefore I’ve decided to add a third JavaScript-related goal – To learn & write an application in Objective J.

3. Make this blog successful

   • Publish at least one post per week
   • Publish a full Symfony tutorial
   • Complete at least one of my personal projects
   • Increase visitor average to 50 a day
   • Increase comment average to 10 per post

   My first month of attempting these goals really hasn’t gone so well, mainly because the fitness thing is taking up so much of my free time. On the other hand, I have been slowly increasing my comment and visitor averages so I think I’m all set to reach my targets. I have re-written my blog css to make it easier to write posts without having to think about styling.

All-in-all I’m off to a slow but steady start – I’ve still got plenty of time to achieve these goals. Rebalancing my life in a more healthy fashion (read: getting off my arse and doing some sport) is going to take some getting used to, but should lead to my having more energy and motivation. I think the most important thing to work on is setting aside blog time & publishing something each week because without doing that nothing else will ever get done.

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So why did you do it?

I tend to work in lots of separate css files (reset, layout, typography, colour etc) and once the major development work is done I put it all into one file and run an optimisation script. This is for two reasons: the first is that @import is bad (via @alistairstead) and the second is that I don’t want my CSS to slow this site down when there is no need. I have tried out a few different CSS optimisation scripts, but I recommend Clean CSS because it has plenty of options,  can leave you with varying degrees of readability and so far it hasn’t broken a single thing.

Anyhow, after putting all my css together into one file and minimising it I then made a few tiny tweaks to the minimised file. Then when I wanted to do a bit of major reworking I ideally needed to work with my non-minimised file, but this was now out of sync… so I was stuck! It all comes down to poor planning of my WordPress theme & poor design of my post styles – I designed the site rather than the content because I didn’t have any, and ended up with some nasty bits.

So lessons are learnt. I now have a manageable system and hopefully a slightly easier to read blog. It should take me less time to crank out posts (as I won’t have to mess with styling the content) and I should be back on track shortly.

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Whilst on holiday I had plenty of time to think about what I wanted to achieve once I got home. I realised that on returning we’d be almost halfway through the year and that setting down goals for the second half of 2009 might be a good idea. So here they are – my 3 Mid Year resolutions, the first one is personal, so those of you here just for the techy stuff should skip to No. 2!

1. Get Fit

   Quite simply, diets don’t work – at least not long term. The only way I’m going to shed my extra stone is to get off my arse every once in a while and do some exercise! I did quite well with this before my holiday – I’ve taken up jogging & gotten involved with a summer rugby league.

   My goal for the rest of the year is to be able to jog steadily for 30 minutes without dying afterward (Yeah, I’m that bad). Hopefully I’ll be able to run the Race For Life next year, and then aim for something bigger and better. If you follow me on twitter prepare for many rugby/fitness related tweets*!

2. Conquer Javascript

   Javascript is my nemesis. I started programming in Java, C++ & PHP and did the typical: “I know other programming languages so I’ll be fine with Javascript” thing. Only I’m not, its scoping and prototypal nature have continually tripped me up. Now it’s time to take the bull by its horns.

   I’ve started reading “JavaScript: The Good Parts” by Douglas Crockford, and it’s explained many of the things that have caused me trouble in the past. Once I’ve finished the book I plan to find a set of tutorials to follow to use to relearn Javascript properly. Hopefully then I’ll be able to complete a few tools I’ve got on the back burner.

   My goal for the rest of the year is to be able to write my own application from scratch and to become familiar with at least one Javascript library (probably either Prototype or YUI).

3. Make this blog successful

   Having already achieved my main goal for the year in setting up my blog, I now need to define some criteria for success so that I can continue to move forward with it. Given that this is meant to be somewhere to put personal projects and share my knowledge, I think the best success criteria are a combination of both my productivity and how well the content is received. This means posting regularly and improving the number of visitors, subscribers & comments.

   My productivity goals are to ensure that I publish at least one blog post each week, including a full Symfony tutorial, and to complete at least one of my personal projects. On the blog side I’m hoping to improve my visitor figures from 20 per day up to 50 visitors per day and my comment average from 3 per post to 10 comments per post. I’m hoping that these goals are realistic and useful measures of how well I’m achieving my aims.

Writing this now is great because it gives me a month to get started and put good habits into place. I will be reviewing my goals in time for July 1st when they will become proper mid-year resolutions!

Does anyone else make mid-year resolutions? Do you think it’s a good idea? Drop me a comment linking to posts about your goals/resolutions and I will be sure stop by.

P.S. I’ve now added this blog to Technorati as part of my plans! Technorati Profile

* Note: this will not reduce the number of cheesecake and other delicious dessert related tweets

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I’m a web developer particularly fond of WordPress and Symfony. I hope to build up a library of useful bits of code by regularly blogging handy “snippets”. I will also be writing “spotlights” which look at certain features, plugins or techy things in more detail.

Other things that you can expect to find here: discussion of the latest HTML and CSS specs, my stumblings with Javascript and dabblings in design, book reviews, tips on tools and resources, and links to my favourite websites and articles around the web. I’ll also be keeping you up-to-date with my personal projects, including a number of Firefox and WordPress plugins.

I hope that there is something here that’s likely to take your interest. Please subscribe or bookmark this site – the real content is coming soon – but for now relax and enjoy your Pimms. Oh and please do let me know what you think! Cheers!!

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