• Exercise more - Other than snow shoveling last year, I didn't get much done.  Not sure how it will work out with a kid coming soon, but it is still a good goal. - Failed, no excuses here just didn't do it. The only "exercise" I did regularly was walking across campus twice a day.
• Be a parent - Not just being a Dad, but baring extra responsibility to help Rebekah stay sane and have quality time with Will. - Success, Will was born March 16th and we have stayed relatively sane.
• See 3 movies in the theater - Success (Watchmen, The Invention of Lying and Avatar)
• Finish one novel a month (First I have to find a novel each month, but we shall see) - Failed, I did read about 8 but not one per month
• Keep up my blog at a reasonable pace - Leaving out the end of the year lists, I had almost 100 posts through the year.  I would like to keep up about that pace.  Something that should help is: Failed, just not the time I used to have for writing
• Album of the Week - Replacing the Pick of the Week will be an Album of the Week.  Current or from the past, I will pick an album each week to recommend. Failed, I gave up about halfway though the year due to the annoyance of getting album covers for each post.
• Write more about music - If the Top 10 Lists showed anything, my traffic goes up when I write about music, so I will work on writing more about music. Success, what I did write, it was mostly about music.

For 2010, I have had some difficulty in thinking of resolutions. The first reason is that I have learned over the last 9 months that you cannot anticipate what your kid is going to do next. I hate to think of a resolution that seems reasonable now, but in a month is totally unreasonable do to a change in Will's routine or behaviors. That being said, here is what I have:

• Better manage my personal budget - I am not terrible at it, but it is a place I can improve
• Decide on a technology for my web site - I am close, I think
• Create my new web site - I have to decide what content I want, how I want to present it and then actually implement it.
• Write 4 posts on my site each month - Some weeks are tougher than others for posts, so monthly might be more attainable
• Engage a new music genre - After getting crap about my top 25 list of the decade being too similar, I figured it was a good excuse to investigate a new genre to keep expanding my music tastes. I had some success with jazz last year, so I am open to suggestions.
• Beat the Metroid Prime trilogy - This one is pretty iffy I think, but if it is the only game I play I might be able to do it.
• Most Important: Be the best husband and dad I can be - Nothing specific here, just want to feel like I did the best I could for the year.

The other reason I haven't done anything is because I want to have it be really really really easy to post to. Lots of times during the day, I want to take a link and post it with a sentence comment, or toss an image up there because our son is just too darn cute. The problem is the barrier to entry. I have to copy the link, make up a title, add some tags, edit an excerpt so all 3 people who go to my site directly get a witty comment and then post it. This is not a difficult process, just time consuming. This gets even more frustrating because I see how easy it is on Facebook to post something, and I want that. Just not in Facebook because then my stuff is trapped behind the 21st century "Great Blue Wall".

This led me to look at Tumblr. Looks pretty close to what I want, but the problem is that not many folks I know use Tumblr. That makes many of the features on there useless to me, and therefore makes me less interested in it. What I really want is a self hosted Tumblr with Disqus support (and have Disqus be able to get comments from Facebook as well). All that just so I MIGHT blog more often.

All of the things above are just about my blog. I have other ideas for my site as well, all taking much more time and effort. The big theory I have is treating my web site as a place that I can organize my digital content. To contrast, Rebekah is fantastically organized in real life. Without her, I am pretty sure the house would be falling apart around me. I can be organized too, but I have to do it in a rigid manner that allows flexibility in how I view my data. Yeah, I know it is impossible to have both of those, but bare with me.

Let's say I have some comics. These comics have all sorts of data with them, things like writers, characters, publish dates, series, etc. They also have things like story arcs which span series, have read orders and their own plots. Today, if I want to read a story arc, I first have to find all of the titles, see if I have them all, then grab them and start reading. I think it would be fantastic if I could go to my site, grab a story arc and it tells me where I need to look to find all of the books for it. I don't have that today, and the frustrating thing is there are data sources out there for much of this, but getting it all put together is time consuming AND I don't have a framework to stick this data in without writing it myself. Oh, I also want there to be some consistency between my blog design and these comics.

So that is the deal, I am too ambitious with my site to get started at any sort of revision. So it suffers, and I tweet and star things in Google Reader until it becomes easier. I really think the next big thing on the web is making data that exists all over usable. The problem is I can see it coming, but I want it now. And while I wait, this site sits, bright blue and waiting.

Basically there are three big things about Will:

1. He is awesome. He amazes me every day with some little thing new. This is only going to get more and more as he continues developing. That being said, for now him looking at me and really focusing is super cool.
2. He is awesome, but he doesn't do much. He eats, poops and sleeps. A lot. This isn't a huge surprise, but it does make me anxious for when he can start really interacting with us.
3. Sleep has changed forever, and not for the better. I have changed my "goals" for sleeping each night to hoping that I can get at least one 3 hour stretch of uninterrupted sleep. A month and a half ago, I would have clobbered someone who limited me to that much sleep. It is amazing how your body can adapt to such huge changes.

In addition, we do have plenty of photos of Will and are adding more all the time, so feel free to check them out.

A little background info, our current Series 2 TiVo works with our cable service by taking in a composite signal from the cable box and uses an IR blaster to change the channels on the cable box. This works well since our cable service is IPTV and comes through an Ethernet cable, not a coax connection, so we need our cable box. This is where problems start with the TiVo HD.

The TiVo HD was designed to be a replacement for your cable box. It only has a coax input and leverages the CableCARD technology to basically replace a standard cable box. This is a problem for us, since we don't have a coax connection. I checked the Southslope cable box and it does have a coax out, so I had some hope we could get it kinda working. My dreams were dashed though when I found the TiVo HD doesn't support the IR blaster, so even if we could route the signal through the TiVo, we couldn't change the channels.

Unfortunately, this meant the TiVo had to be shipped back. This was disappointing for both Rebekah and I, and while there is some blame to be passed to both TiVo and Southslope, I blame TiVo more. They basically removed functionality from the Series 2 to the HD. Right now, we are able to record and watch TV through the TiVo Series 2, but the new TiVo wouldn't work at all. I might blame Southslope for having a unique cable setup, but it isn't like this is some old technology, it is up and coming. I would hope TiVo would be looking for ways to support this. The TiVo HD even says that it cannot support satellite connections at this time. That is a rather large market to not support, again when you have a technology already that does work with it.

Hopefully TiVo works on adding these other markets in the future. What it does do for us is make me look at other technologies that I had ignored because I was so pleased with the TiVo service. At the end of the day, we will likely stick with TiVo, but it isn't good for business when customers start looking at other options.

The Front Page

I realize that the front page might not always be the landing spot for people searching, so I decided to take some of the actual content off the front and instead try to cram as much about me as possible out there. For example, on the previous design I linked to my Last.fm and Flickr profiles.  This time, I wanted to bring a little bit of that content here, so the bottom of the front page now has that info.

In eliminating posts from the front page, I did want to leave a teaser for posts out there, so I am taking advantage of the excerpt field to display a byline of sorts for each post. I think this is a good middle ground where people can see what a post is about but not have a lengthy page to navigate to see posts they may have missed.

Organization

Awhile back, I decided to take advantage of only a few categories and then use lots of tags to organize stuff on the site. This worked pretty much, but I found that some content didn't warrant a new category, but would be useful to navigate back and forth through. For this I found the Organize Series plugin. An example of this is the 2008 Albums series. Instead of trying to fit my top ten list into a tag called bestof2008, now I can create a series so you can quickly navigate through the albums or songs for the year. This would also work for the American's Guide to Soccer, I just need to port the content from pages to posts and put them in a series.

Design

When starting work on the design, I wanted to keep the elements fairly simple.  To start, I decided to use just one typeface. I love messing with typefaces, but I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could use just one type throughout the site. For this I went with Helvetica Neue with Arial as a backup. This works for a couple of reasons.  First, if you compare the two "versions" you can see there is a distinct difference between Helvetica and Arial. Second, it makes the site nicer for Mac users since Windows doesn't provide Helvetica by default.

Another example of making it simple is to limit the use of graphics in the design. The only real graphics in the design are the logos for the social sites on the front page. Everything else is handled using just CSS styling. Because I wanted to focus on CSS styling only, I decided to go with the model of graded browser support. For browser that support some CSS3 properties, the site will have some little touches, such as the rounded bottom on the Marktopia banner.  I plan on tweaking a few more elements to take advantage of these new properties. This means that people using browsers that are leading edge will have a little nicer experience while IE6 users can still use the site.

I also realize that I have gone through designs on this site fairly regularly and that some people like those old designs. If you are one of those people, then feel free to use the theme switcher on the sidebar. I won't be making sure that posts like perfect in those old designs though, so don't complain if images or text look funny.

How I Made the Design

Using WordPress, the default theme can be a fickle beast. Because of that, I decided to start from scratch with my CSS on the design. This gets rid of any weird things and allows me to make sure that the only things styled are things I want. Because it is easier to work locally, I decided to go with MAMP and get WordPress installed on my machine, then used Textmate to create the CSS and edit any template files I needed to.

Content for WordPress posts can be rather varied and with over 500 posts, it would be difficult to test my new design on all of them. To help with this, I found an import of content that has all of the common (and not so common) content types in it. I then designed around that and got all of the CSS the way I wanted. After that, I did a full import from my blog to the local site to double check there was no obvious weirdness.

For page navigation, I found another plugin that creates something a little more elaborate than "Older Posts" and "Newer Posts". Mimicking many forums or news sites, the paging allows you to jump a page or two back, or all the way to the beginning of the site easily.

Comments are also styled a little nicer with this design. I took advantage of the new threaded comments in 2.7, did some light zebra striping of multiple comments and called out when I post a comment on the site. Comments usually suffered in my previous designs, so I hope these are a little nicer to read.

What Next?

In the past, when I got tired of a design, I would always start over. The average lifespan of a design was usually about 3-4 months. The last design lasted 8 months and this one I want to last for even longer, but with some tweaks along the way. A few of these I am aware of include:

• Messing with the logos for the social sites
• Adding a teaser about myself on the front page
• Tinker with the Last.fm view to have albums instead of songs
• Better styling of the delicious posts
• More CSS3 stuff (Rounded corners and box shadows for some elements)

I am always open to suggestions, so if you have questions about my process, thoughts about the design or just general ideas about the site, feel free to post them in the comments!

Tech (Work or Home)

• Completed! - Finish Help Desk Projects - There are a number of Help Desk web projects in progress right now so getting some done would be great.
• Completed! - Become a SharePoint programming whiz - I have a feeling that SharePoint is going to be more and more popular on campus with some need for custom uses, so becoming better at SP programming will be very useful
• Pretty darn close, 49 picks were written almost on time - Write a blog article each week called “Service/Software of the Week” that highlights a service or piece of software.

Personal Life

• Completed! - Take a Trip Somewhere - Less specific than San Fran trip, but I would like to go somewhere
• Completed! - Finish Painting inside the House - More than halfway there with the first day of the year, just gotta finish up two areas of the house
• Completed! - Put a ceiling fan in the bedroom - I like ceiling fans
• Completed! - Try and fix the backyard - It is a wreck and I would like to get some forward momentum with it
• Not Quite - Exercise more - I don’t do much at all now for exercise so I want to start getting in better shape

Stuff Stuff

• Completed! - Second Car

That is pretty good in my opinion, I guess that happens when you set reasonable goals.

Now for my new resolutions.  I have to say that with the total unknown of how my life will really change once Will is born, these are going to either be easily achievable or way over my head.

• Exercise more - Other than snow shoveling last year, I didn't get much done.  Not sure how it will work out with a kid coming soon, but it is still a good goal.
• Be a parent - Not just being a Dad, but baring extra responsibility to help Rebekah stay sane and have quality time with Will.
• See 3 movies in the theater
• Finish one novel a month (First I have to find a novel each month, but we shall see)
• Keep up my blog at a reasonable pace - Leaving out the end of the year lists, I had almost 100 posts through the year.  I would like to keep up about that pace.  Something that should help is:
• Album of the Week - Replacing the Pick of the Week will be an Album of the Week.  Current or from the past, I will pick an album each week to recommend.
• Write more about music - If the Top 10 Lists showed anything, my traffic goes up when I write about music, so I will work on writing more about music.

That about covers it, we will see how it goes! Happy New Year to everyone of course and hope you will keep reading throughout 2009.

I want to describe Hera a little now to share with you some of what makes Rebekah and I happy every day.  Hera has more personality that Purrball and Star put together.  We love both Purrball and Star just as much as Hera, but I know that Rebekah and I could not handle three cats with as much personality as Hera.  In the morning when Rebekah eats breakfast, Hera hops up next to her to say and to try and sneak a bit of breakfast.  Hera doesn't even like what Rebekah is having, she is just so curious to see what it is.  And that is Hera's defining trait, curiousity, sometimes to the point of annoyance, but always to the smile of Rebekah or myself.  She has this amazing ability to make either of us smile, even in difficult times.  That is what makes not having her here so tough, she brings a joy to our lives that cannot be replaced easily.

We still don't know what will happen with Hera.  Rebekah and I are hoping and praying she will be able to come home and go back to normal, that it is some goofy physical thing that can be fixed and next weekend I can write about how great it is.  If that isn't the case though, I hope that others can think of Rebekah and me and of Hera too, that we call can find life just as joyous as we did two weeks ago.

Hera in the Fridge

You can click on the picture above to find all of the pictures on Flickr of Hera.

P.S. Sorry if this makes you cry Rebekah

The point of this post is that content is always king, but how that content is displayed is a close second.  You can write a great story, make a great web page, or make a clever sign, but all of that is supported by the choice of type you use.  If you are more curious about the subject, I would recommend checking out ilovetypography.com.  It is a great place to start out to learn about type and find other resources if you are so inclined.