Site update

A couple of weeks ago now I decided to take a break from writing on the blog due to personal reasons. Being a bit of a geek, it’s fair to say that I have a lot of IT-related personal projects on the boil at any given time. Or rather, I used to.

However, I found that it had reached the point where I was focusing so much on the blog that I wasn’t giving myself any time to work on other projects that also happen to give me a great deal of personal satisfaction. So I wanted to pull back from the blog for a little while to evaluate where I was going, and what I was doing.

In its own way, this has been both a challenge and also very rewarding. Rewarding because I actually managed to achieve several things that I’d been putting off for ages, and challenging because it made me realise how much I’ve been using this blog as a measure of personal satisfaction.

On top of all that, last Friday marked my partner’s 40th birthday, and I would have been remiss if I’d not spent serious time on preparations for that*.

So, where does this leave nsrd.info?

I’m back, the hiatus is over, but having had some time for reflection, there’ll be a few changes so that I can ensure I don’t let the blog take over my personal life again. Here’s what those changes are going to be:

• I’m going to wherever possible limit myself to two articles a week. Some weeks there may only be one.
  
• I’d be very pleased to have additional contributors. A while ago Ronny Egner contributed a great article about installing the NetWorker client on OpenSolaris, and I’d be pleased to hear from others who have information they’d like to contribute.
  
• Before the hiatus, I cutover to using Mail Chimp for notices about new articles. I’m going to continue to use Mail Chimp, but, I’ll be only using Mail Chimp for those one or two articles a week. What does that mean? See the next point…
  
• While I’ll only be aiming to publish one or two articles a week, I’ll be starting a new “Tidbit” category and if minor items come to mind during the week (e.g., I spot an article I’d recommend you read), I’ll post it under the Tidbit category. With that in mind, you may very well wish to subscribe to the site’s RSS feed. These won’t be long articles, more like extended tweets.
  
• My previous plan for micromanuals will probably slow down quite a bit. At this point I’ll be aiming to provide a micromanual for configuring LinuxVTL with NetWorker by the end of June, and after that I’ll evaluate when the next one will come out, and what it will be about.
  

In short, I’m hoping that by taking a more structured approach to the blog I’ll get a more balanced personal life 🙂

In keeping with the strategy of actually finishing some personal projects, this week I’m going to be focusing on completing the Nomenclature page rather than completing new articles.

Thanks for your patience!

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* On that front, here’s a tip for a 40th birthday present: an iPad. Well, that was part of it. The other tip is – if you’re going to have a party – organise in advance a photo book of everyone attending, and get them to sign and leave a message in the book on the night. It seems you can’t go wrong with that, as I was pleased to discover.