Happy New Year!! First off, I I hope everyone had a safe and joyful holiday season! Mine has been fairly quiet, though I've actually managed to get some overdue "to-dos" done, including ripping up stuff in the kitchen, which is always fun. I also moved into the current decade by switching out my old "dumb phone" for a Nexus 4. It is pretty nifty and I'm already using it way more than I expected I would (sometimes to my sweetie's annoyance LOL).
Around the new year is when there is tons of talk about "resolutions". Personally, I never set resolutions at the start of the year, instead, I set goals. I try to make them pretty specific, measurable, and all that stuff you're supposed to do to make them obtainable. So for my first post of the new year here, I figured I'd talk goals, more specifically, goal results.
Out of the 40 or so goals I had for 2013, I had a few that were related to web development and my websites. So let's see how I did:
Make at least 12 posts to ColdFusion Beyond (i.e. this site :-))
I made 32 posts to the site in 2013! The well did start running a little dry towards the end, especially once NaNo time hit, but I suspect part of that also has to do with my being too "strict" with myself on what I allow myself to post here. Still, it has certainly been my prolific year ever. By comparison, in 2012, I only did 17 posts. It's also more posts than all the rest of the years before 2012 combined! You guys also commented way more as well, with 59 comments coming in. That's more than all years combined, even 2012. I'm hoping the change to Disqus continues that move! 🙂I'd say this goal was met with a resounding success.
Make at least 12 posts Animania
For those who may not have known, Animania was the anime/manga blog I'd run since 2005, where I mostly posted reviews of different shows and series, as well as some Japanese light novels. I met the goal I set in 2013; in fact, I made 23 posts to the site over the course of the year, but unlike with this site, that wasn't a high count of posts except for in recent years.As you may have already guessed from the tenses use in the previous paragraph, in December I decided to shut down Animania. For me, it had become more of a chore than a pleasure. The site had few readers, most of whom just came for my Sailor Moon episode guide, and getting any kind of comments or even review ratings was rare. It felt like I was wasting time that could be better spent elsewhere. Having the site also resulted in my putting all this pressure on myself when I had new books to read or anime to watch, you know the "gotta review this after I read/watch it" that kind of thing. Now I can just enjoy my anime/manga as is again. I didn't keep the old stuff online, I just archived it offline and left a shut down notice.
So while this goal was successful, it was a bittersweet success.
Build an admin site for An Eclectic World for easier maintenance of my collections
An Eclectic World is my personal website and my longest running one to date. It was the first site I built, way back in 1995, and while the look and location have changed over it's nearly two decades of existence, it is still going and likely always will. These days, the biggest functions of the site are housing my online catalog of my books, DVDs, and video games. Though it's all database driven, that database is all managed manually! I did a massive overhaul to the site a few years ago, which launched in 2012, but said overhaul did not include an administration system for managing the dynamic content.Alas, this year did not see the addition of that administration system either. I wrote out my lengthy to do list for the next version of the site, and I got started on it, but then I was just plain lazy and kept making excuses and finding other stuff to do. I did, at least, build myself some little helper scripts that let me update the collections by importing entries from Excel spreadsheets, but that is a far cry from everything I planned.
So yeah, total failure.
Learn PHP 5
I already talked about this a little in a recent post, but our transition from ColdFusion to PHP didn't really get underway this year. We were working on some existing projects, including transitioning a few legacy applications off ColdFusion 8 to 9, doing some big updates to one of our key mission critical applications, and my writing not one but TWO user guides. So learning PHP went by the wayside. This year, we will be doing some new development though so learning PHP will be coming to the fore burner this year.Not a failure, just delayed
Obtain my MySQL 5 Developer certification
For the last two years, I've thought about getting my MySQL certification. I got the study guide back in 2012, but never did get to do the test. So I made it a goal in 2013. However, after a lot of thought, I realized that it probably wasn't worth doing. Professionally, I do our DB designs, including resulting documentation, but we have no control over our DB servers. We aren't running anything close to the current version, so going for the 5.6 exam would require me trying to memorize a bunch of stuff (not my strong suit) versus having actual know how. Oracle does still offer the 5 exam, but I found myself unable to really justify the cost to my department or out of pocket. It isn't something I feel my boss would actually see as an asset versus some other focus. Nor would I feel it would be of benefit to me professionally when I'm not out looking for another job and have no plans to do so.So this goals was cancelled as not really being something to aim for.
Take some Project Management courses
Read at least five non-fiction books related to either project management or software development
While learning project management stuff was listed as a goal for on my performance review in 2013, there hasn't really been any push to do it. I researched book and course options, prepared a summary, and all that. But the resulting recommendations didn't even get a response, and we really haven't had any further discussion on it. As my partner has also been rather "why bother", I finally decided I over estimated the need to it and dropped the issue.So this one was cancelled as a goal I didn't seem to need to have after all
So two successes, one failure, one delay, and two cancellations. Though it wasn't a stated goal, I also did the long overdue "refresh" of this site to correct some stylistic issues, updated the code to the last version of Mango, and of course did that switch to Disqus. So nice successes there for this site too. I would have liked to have had that failure be a success, but on the whole, I'm not entirely displeased with the results.
As for 2014, out of my 34 "official" goals, 3 are web related. Two probably look familiar…
- Start learning PHP
- Finish updates to An Eclectic World
- At least 20 posts to ColdFusion Beyond
On top of those three, I'd like to start making time to really dig into the meat of the Mango Blog code. At this point, I feel the official project is dead, and there are many changes/fixes I'd like to make. The code itself though is confusing, for me, since it is architectured very differently from the way I'm used to. Still, I'd like to figure out how to fix the issue with the archive pages, reconfigure the back end WYSIWYG to be more helpful to me, make the post list in the admin sortable, things like that. And a fuller visual redesign would be nice too. 🙂