My Summer Plan – Produce More, Consume Less

When I get home from work, I’m usually pretty tired (OK, most nights, I’m really tired). So, I don’t do much other than:

• Sometimes make dinner. Usually Jen makes it or we order out, but I do cook on occasion.
• Play video games with the kids
• Watch TV
• Screw around on my ubuntu laptop, but mostly I surf or play games while watching TV.

And that’s it. On rare occasions, I do community stuff like go to Refresh.

Since I don’t travel much anymore, I can’t remember the last time I read a book. I have a stack of things I want to read that I just haven’t gotten around to. I have a ton of little personal projects that are sitting around partially done that I should finish.\
So, this summer, I’m going to watch less TV and do more. I’m going to read some books, write some code and have some fun. I know reading isn’t “producing” anything, but it’s more educational and intellectually stimulating than watching fictional characters on TV have and resolve fictional problems.

My first project? Redo this blog. I realized we’ve been running this blog Movable Type for almost 8 years, and running it on Dreamhost for over 7. This “design” (if you can call it that) has been here, basically untouched, but over 5. It’s time to do something else. I rarely post anymore because it’s slow. I put most little stuff over on tumblr, and only come here for longer posts.

My plan for the blog is to build my own from scratch. I know, I know, the world has enough blogging platforms. I’m not going to make a “platform”. It’s just a blog for Jen and me that’s fun to play with and easy to maintain. It’ll be on Rails and backed by MongoDB, so it should be trivial to add new stuff, rip it out, start over, or move it around.

I plan on taking my time, playing with new stuff along the way (web fonts, HTML5, writing tests, the design, etc), and will roll it out when I feel like it.

I’ll take breaks to do some reading, but won’t be doing any other personal hackery until it’s done. Once it’s finished, if there’s time, I have an idea for a twitter app I’ve been wanting to play with and couple things I’ve started with other folks that I want to finish up.

It should be fun. I’ll post updates as I feel like it. In the meantime, what are you going to produce this summer?