For the last year or more, I’ve been trying to spend time in the evenings working on writing content and creating websites, as well as get fit, cook dinners, do housework, read books and magazines, and a whole lot more. But evenings are very limited – I typically get home from work somewhere between 6 and 7 (sometimes later), and by the time I’ve gotten home and eaten, I have only a short time to spend on getting anything else done before I should be heading to bed and sleeping.

And then, its hard to start something and stop, then to try and pick it up again the next night – so much time is lost in trying to remember where I was up to. The result is that I end up staying up later than I should (and then getting less sleep than I need), and then by the weekend I’m not interested in doing anything except be lazy.

So, now, I’m going to try a new plan. In the week I’ll try and relax in the evenings, and limit the time I spend ‘working’ to about a 30-45 minute task. Then I should be good to spend several hours on Saturday and Sunday to do the bigger things.

One step is to work smarter, and not harder. For example, I find writing is easier if I am doing it in a long session, and so instead of trying to write a blog post two or three evenings a week, I’ll write in long session at the weekend (today, I’ve spent about 2 hours on it) and queue up the posts (I got this idea from my friend John of SixLabRats). That is opposed to the hour or so I’d have spent on each blog post on a weekday evening because of trying to gear up and focus after spending a day at the office (invariably tired because I had been up late the night before trying to get something else done again).

If the experiment is successful, then you should see more content here and at RandomTweak, as well as a new theme at RT next week, and hopefully the Drupal‘d version of HK a couple of weeks after that (with content).

It seems like almost everyday people produce yet another top so many of whatever lists (or at least link to them) – which then spawns of a massive amount of discussion along the lines of “why didn’t you include X on the list?” or “no way is Z number 1″ or “pfft, B is so much better than C”. Then another website comes along and picks the same topic with almost the exact same positions for whatever they’re listing, except for a handful of meaningless differences, and incurring almost exactly the same discussion and controversy.

A huge portion of these lists are simply the opinion whoever is authoring them – and are highly subjective and rather pointless. Others that are the results of ‘public vote’ are also deeply flawed and subjective – and tend to claim they’re more than they really are (the “nation’s favourite” is typically voted by only a few hundred people out of a total of a few thousand respondants). A further problem with ‘public votes’ are that they are affected by current affairs (the winner of BBC2’s “Big Read” a few years ago was The Lord of the Rings – not surprising, considering that the trilogy was being released to cinemas at the time).

Now I love The Lord of the Rings (I’ve read the trilogy almost every year since I was 10), and it would be up there amongst my other favourites, so I’m not knocking it the position – but I’m pretty sure that if it had not been for the movie releases at the time, it would have been a different book on the “Big Read” list.

But these lists still keep coming. Why?

Mostly, people like to show off that they’ve read the right books, seen the right movies, and been to the right places. We get lists of music, books, films, places to go for a relaxing holiday, places to go for an adventurous holiday, worst places in the world rated by gum per square centimetre on the pavement. Most of these lists are written by individuals who want to show off how cool they are by having read/watched/done everything they are listed – and their personal investment in the list is transparent once you start reading their responses to criticism.

I admit to the same weakness – I list all of the books I own at LibraryThing because I want to show them off. I’d also love the same kind of thing for music and movies – but there isn’t anything as useful or feature-laden as LT for these media.

But that is a fairly passive thing – mostly I just add a book when I buy, and try and review it when I’ve read it. I doubt I’d ever write a top 10 (or more) because I just couldn’t decided on a day-to-day basis.

About the only good thing about top 10 lists is that some list creators will add some interesting information about each item in their list – but most of them end up repeating the same old tired thing so that it is almost like reading the same website but in a slightly different order.

I just wish they would stop (adds top 10 lists to the “Top 10 Lists of Things I Don’t Like!”)

I’ve just spent the last week switching RandomTweak over to Drupal after trying it out on my development box for a couple of weeks beforehand.

It wasn’t quite as easy as WordPress is to get a the site using the same features as it was before (tags, syntax highlighting, adsense, etc), but it does offer a lot more flexibility and options for enhancing the site (user/author profiles, contact forms, etc).

Most of my time was actually spent on fixing up the content published under WordPress and fitting it into the new site – there were a couple of automated tools for this, but they were a bit flakey and caused a couple of problems which would have needed more editing again. I’m looking at a way to improve the automated migration so that it’s more useful and more under control.

The next site will be this one – there’s more content here to deal with, but it’s simpler (mostly). The tricky part will be migrating the image and photo albums over – although, I might not be able to do that automatically, either, and may end up just doing it progressively. The main reason is that I always had a vision of how these albums should be organised, and the best gallery plugin (NGG) for WordPress forced me into a different system. We’ll see, anyway.

I reckon it’ll be a couple of weeks before I’m really ready to switch HorusKol over, as I need to get to grips with Drupal’s themes and blocks system, and then there’s the galleries. Still, I’m looking forward to it, and it should be good learning experience for when I start using Drupal on client sites.

About the worst thing about any project – especially one that is being spun out of your own head – is that you are almost always at square one, with a blank sheet, and an empty SVN repository.

It’s the same as writing something like this post – or any other creative work. Unless you have a clear objective, you can’t really set a direction. Without a direction, you can’t make those first steps.

Of course, in starting a project, you generally have a bit of an idea on the outcome – but you should always set down what your objectives are. Then you can figure out the steps needed to reach those objectives. And once you have those steps, you can work out everything this else.

So, I’ve gotten past the blank sheets by knowing what I want to get out the project – and the only problem left is the focus of attention that the work requires.

Focus of Attention

Lately I’ve been dabbling in Python, which is pretty nice language, and quite fun (a lot of the documentation is written in a familiar rather than over-technical way). But, the experience has been frustrating as well.

After spending time investigating various methods and solutions, I kept hitting on issues with limitations in a particular solution, or scarcity of documentation of another.

I ended up spending more time looking for documentation than I did making any kind of progress (and a lot of the time, I wasn’t even moving forwards).

One major block, I guess, is that I spend 40 hours of my week working on PHP solutions (and sometimes PERL, but only in order to patch or extend an existing script) at the office,  and jamming in another language just wasn’t happening.

So, I took the decision the other night to use and develop the skills I have, and then focus my attention on the work needing to be done instead of reading, reading, reading.

And so, in one 2-hour session, I made more progress than I had done in the whole previous week.

Experience

That’s really the key, when you think about it. I’ve been at PHP since 2002, and clocked up thousands of hours of knowledge and experience along the way. I’m still learning it – sometimes time constraints on projects don’t always let you spend the time to find the better solution – but all that experience does add up.

So, for at least a while longer, I’m going to be a PHP developer.

Quite a lot of hype has gone into Web 2.0 over the past couple of years or so, and the basic aspects of what makes a site or application Web 2.0 are not going to go anywhere, so I was quite surprised at an article from Michael Arrington at TechCrunch saying that Web 2.0 is dead.

What made this especially odd, was that on that exact same day, the BBC ran an article on tapping new revenue on websites by embracing Web 2.0 elements as part of your site.

Okay, so Arrington was really talking about the slowdown in Web 2.0 startups and growth, rather than the end of the functionality, but I still think he goes too far. The slowdown in startups is easily linked to the general slowdown in the global economy that has been affecting all businesses.

But even if no new web startups were created from now on, this would still not be the end of Web 2.0. While applications like Facebook and Twitter, and offerings from other startups, seem to lead the charge, there are plenty of websites out there that can and will be enhanced by the implementation of Web 2.0. For an example of this, look at a site like BBC News – news reports there are linked out to related articles and external sites, and many stories now encourage public discussions and comments. Although, they do have some way to go – they have many blog, such as the dot.life blog by Rory Cellan-Jones, but there is very little response by the blog authors after comments have been made by members of the public.

So, with all the companies out there with a web-presence, I don’t think Web 2.0 has much to worry about for now.

Even the new idea of Web 3.0 isn’t going to depose Web 2.0 – the scope is just too different again. Web 2.0 was all about the content and the interaction (although a number of people mistook some of the technologies employed, such as Ajax, as Web 2.0). Web 3.0 is, however, all about the new technologies.

So, Web 2.0 is not dead – but the focus is moving from startups whose only purpose was to have a Web 2.0 application, to enhancing all of those existing websites out there for organisations and entities that have yet to tap into the full power of their userbase.

Well, it was probably one of the most dullest ways to spend a week off work, but it was nice and (mostly) relaxing. I didn’t exactly get all I had set out to do either, but hey, it was supposed to be time off.

What I did manage was get out on my bike a couple of times – Ride #1 and Ride #2. I also managed to spend a whole afternoon just chatting with me sister as we wandered up and down the Marion shopping centre, and of course I got to spend time with my niece.

I also started sorting through the collection of data CDs I have stacked on a shelf in my study – most of which is defunct data (like old backups of this site from 5 years ago), or duplicates (like my photo albums, which I’m sorting through and going to place onto a single DVD – oh and post up the choice pictures onto here).

And then there was the reading, and the sorting of the myriad bookmarks, so I have been able to organise a lot of things that I want to write here and on Religious Funny.

Finally, I spent most of the weekend at my parents – helping my Dad with digging up half the garden in order for him to put decking where there was once lawn. Needless to say, I hurt a little now from the hard graft, but I’m surprised that I don’t feel as bad as I thought I would.

So, yeah, back to work today – and it was actually a pretty non-hectic day. Obviously, there was the marathon reading of email, but after that I got back into the swing again today.

Another thing I started doing in the last week was a timeplan in my head – when I’m going to be writing for Horus Kol, Religious Funny and Random Tweak – when I’m going to working on my new Python/Django projects – and when I’m going to doing other things like more drawing, reading, and general relaxing. It goes a bit further than that – I’m starting to think about what I want to be doing in 2010 and beyond already (and we haven’t even got into the last month of 2008 yet). Needless to say, this involves things like buying a home, and travelling more frequently and over more distance again, and getting into shape.

There’s nothing like a week off for getting your head together.