Here I sit, looking at past projects (portfolio) and posts thinking of the work that goes into the site versus the work that goes into the content. The result is, too much time goes into the site and not enough into the content. There must be an easier way. A way to encourage myself to write more content and avoid my temptation to tinker with site mechanics.

There are also numerous places where I maintain some form of content. Some are more regular than others. While they all have their primary goals, I get them mixed up once in a while. And I also purposefully mix them up sometimes, while living on the edge of the life-work balance. I need to sort that out and make it require much less mental energy.

There are several different chunks of content out there; course materials, past projects, quotes, book notes, development notes, project ideas, publications, and other uncategorized things. Looking at the spread, coming up with a category list might be a great first step.

Here is my initial category list for articles:

  • development – general development thoughts and ideas
  • mobile – development and projects geared towards mobile devices
  • release – news release type things, products in app stores
  • product – release product articles, notes, information
  • courses – related to courses taught or taken (I don’t like this tag name)
    • cos450 – COS 450/540 Operating Systems @ USM
    • cos460 – COS 460/5?? Computer Networks @ USM
    • cos399 – COS 399 Programming Autonomous Robots @ USM
    • cos497 – COS 497 Independent Study @ USM
  • site – website notes, updates, improvements
  • quote – collected quotes
  • book – book notes, taken from Kindle, iBooks, etc.
  • car – related to fixing vehicles and motors
  • radio – related to amateur radio
  • electronics – electronic projects, hardware
  • games – related to games, video or otherwise

Now I need to commit to some next steps to actually get this done. Here, of course, is where I usually fall down. For personal projects I tend not to be very good at following a schedule. It’s my project, why should I? So here is a not-schedule but some general ideas on next steps instead.

  • Commit to a template and stick to it.
  • Force content into the template, break projects out where they make sense.
  • Investigate alternate hosting locations ** Github ** Amazon S3 ** Google Sites

Updates

February 7, 2015: Updated to include radio category and clean up the text.