Aims for 2010

Posted January 7th, 2010 in Miscellaneous Postings

To conclude my recent posts looking back at 2009 and forward to 2010 I present some aims for 2010 for this blog and some of my other projects.

Aim #1: Continue to post regularly on LAMP topics

This one's a no brainer. One of the main purposes of this blog is to create useful content about web programming using the LAMP stack and Javascript. (Check back tomorrow for another reflective post about why I write this blog for some more reasons I do it).

Ideally there should be a new post every day following my schedule but this isn't always realistic due to other life experiences happening (such as the birth of my second son last year), holidays and so on and not having enough posts pre-written to cover the breaks. So on as many days as practicable.

Aim #2: Build blog income to a reliable NZ$1000 per month

As I mentioned in yesterday's follow up post to my 2009 aims I noted that one of my aims for 2009 had been to get this blog to an earning level of US$600 per month, which at the start of the year was the equivilent of NZ$1000 per month. Sadly the US Dollar dropped significantly through the second part of the year and now US$600 is only worth NZ$815...

So aim #2 for 2010 is to build the income level to a reliable NZ$1000 per month, which means around US$750 per month. I know it will bop up and down over the next couple of months so by reliable I mean that I can count on getting at least NZ$1000 in the bank each month from the various advertising and affiliate avenues I have running on this site.

At the same time, advertising and affiliate stuff should not dominate the content of this blog; it should still remain a useful source of content without too much advertising fluff all over the place.

Aim #3: Add commenting ASAP

Having the ability for users to comment has been something I've been meaning to add for a long time, and I had an email this morning from someone suggested exactly this. So it's time for me to finally get around to doing it and implement it by the end of January. The only problem with coding your own CMS of course is having to create this sort of stuff yourself...

Aim #4: Finally write that Nettuts tutorial

I submitted a number of ideas to Jeffrey Way at Nettuts 3 months ago and was going to write one of them up and too many other things got in the way, not least the birth of son number 2. I must write this tutorial this month and see if I can get it published. I would then like to have at least one tutorial published on Nettuts each month, ideally one per week as long as I can write good enough content to be considered.

Aim #5: Launch Running Calendar properly

I am a marathon runner and have been wanting to create a running calendar and community for New Zealand for some time now, and actually did so last year but never fully completed the functionality nor added all the content it needed.

This is another aim to get completed by the end of January to at least have the calendar part working and then build on the user functions over the next two to three months.