What's With the Big Pause?

When I first decided to create an online blog I wanted to avoid a common pitfall of many other blogs: lack updates. While there were a few empty months in 2009, it feels like a did a good job with regular posts every week or so... Until the New Year rolled around. This is the first blog post in over six months.

Starting in mid-November a few things changed that really impacted my regular blogging. The first, and most obvious one, was winter. While I do enjoy winter adventuring, driving to the Upper Peninsula through the snow to come up with fresh content for the hiking side of my blog was something I decided to avoid. That, coupled with decrease daylight and other seasonal blues, dampened my motivation to write new hiking blogs.

Another problem that I ran into was a decrease in time. Not only did I start working later hours in November at my full-time job, but I started a large contract project that ate up any free time I normally reserved for my personal site development. My site was half rewritten at this time - I was starting to implement a model-view-controller framework (that was later scrapped for my current, very awesome framework) - and I was trying to concentrate on too many independent web project at the same time.

So, to sum that all up, I simply ran out of time and energy to blog during the first half of 2010. I hope that's about to change. My new site is up and running (well, 4 of my 6 subdomains are, at least), making it easier for me to fix mistakes and update new features. Also, as I'll explain in a future post, I'm creating better integration between my independent sites. Even if I start running out of time to create new blog posts in the future, the existing posts will have more content, providing more information to the reader.

Here's hoping that the second half of 2010 turns out to be more productive than the first half!