I’ve just signed up to Project52. Originally intended as a small group of friends supporting each other to reach their goals, there are now over 700 members and I’m really interested to see how this develops into a workable system.

Last year I promised to write once a week and failed, so I’m hoping this might spur me on to achieve that goal this year. The intention is that a tracking system will be created to monitor progress of group members. If the system works (once it goes live) I’ll also be purchasing a mug as a daily reminder – I just wish they did one in purple!

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.

It’s now been over a month since my last post to this blog. I had promised not to ever let it get longer than 10 days but this past month has been an exceptional circumstance. I’ve had a few enquiries regarding part 3 of my YUI articles, so this post is just a quick update to say it’s still on it’s way!

This past week and a half I have “moved home” in more ways than one. Not only have I had to move EVERYTHING out of the house we bought 8 months ago so that electricians can re-wire the entire place, but I have also moved this blog to a new home with PeartreeUK. The result is I have been unbelievably busy, have no electricity at home (or sofa, or bed) and the 3rd part of my YUI: Javascript Carousel series has been delayed.

Web Hosting is a minefield…

Seeing the web hosting feature in the latest edition of .net Magazine has confirmed my feelings about the web hosting industry: it’s a minefield. A completely over saturated market of small-fry & big brands, most of which you will never have heard of unless you’ve heard a horror story or two. In my experience it doesn’t seem to matter where you turn, something unexpected goes wrong.

..last weekend I decided to finally sort out my hosting life. With all my resold accounts still hanging around on slowly-slowly-Surpass, and my blog on clunky-Clook, I’ve turned back to the one place I know I’ll get what I pay for – PearTreeUK. They may be relatively small, but there’s nothing like being able to get hold of an intelligent human being whenever you need one! Having kept my original account open as a test bed, I have now upgraded to a reseller with them.

On the first of June I published a summary of my aims for the rest of the year. The plan was that these were 6 month goals, but that I had a cheeky extra month to start working towards them, test them out and see how realistic they were. So now that I’ve had my extra month it’s time to review these goals, and adjust them to make sure they are both realistic and challenging.

This past week or so I’ve been a busy bee re-writing the CSS for this blog. That might sound like an odd thing to do, but it had become unmanageable and was slowing me down. So this is a quick heads up, if you spot any bugs please let me know – you probably won’t notice the few design tweaks I’ve made!

This is a pretty silly & out of the norm post for me, but what the hell! Whilst in Stitch’s Great Escape @ Disneyland last month I was enthralled by the use of a clever font so that it looked like all the signs were written in an alien language. All the characters were just [...]

Over the weekend I updated my blog to Wordpress 2.8. It’s been a relatively smooth process complete screw-up (see my comment at the bottom) although I lost my archive and recent post widgets as I had hacked them to be multiple instance. As they are now multiple instance anyway (hurrah) I was able to remove the extra code and get everything back working properly.

At the beginning of 2009 I had been in my first full time job for 2 months, had graduated from my Masters degree less than a month ago and had lived in my newly purchased home for just over a week. With so much going on I didn’t have time to think up a New Year’s resolution. The only thing I had planned was that I wanted to get a blog up and running this year!

Following in the tradition of new beginnings that comes with the arrival of Spring, I’ve launched my blog. Please help yourself to a Pimms & Lemonade, find yourself a warm spot on my decking, and make yourself comfortable whilst I explain a little of what this blog is for.