But have I ever been? Not really, judging from the frequency of my posts. But I did use to write, and write a lot! I started a diary at 13, when I got one as a gift from an aunt. And for long periods, I wrote every day, it was mostly a kind of outlet for the things that bothered me, if I remember right.

Toward the end of the nineties I started to write some electronic entries in a program called AOLPress, but I just kept them on my hard-drive, so no bloggage in sight yet! In 2000 I built a website and had a 'diary' on there, which saw about three entries, made at half-yearly intervals. And now I am here, "on the web" in some form or other for over a decade, and I have not really written all that much.

But I have been wanting to change that for quite a while, I think because it is a way to connect, and especially connect to the web development world that I have grown so fond of. I did not do resolutions this year, they don't work very well for me, but I have quite a few wishes, and one of the strongest is (apart from that I don't want anything bad to happen), that I will be able to write more. Just how do I get there? We will see. I think sometimes you can trust a wish to your subconscious and at some point it will make those things happen, although it is not at all clear when, and it can be years in some cases. There is no point forcing myself though, something like "at least a post a week". I know that just won't work. But while I am waiting for things to happen, I might just write a few posts in the meantime...

There is a few things that kept me from writing, apart from the obvious which is not making the time for it.

• Not really being clear what this blog is meant to be about
• Having too high expectations of myself and wanting to write something witty and profound all the time
• Being a sluggish documenter of the new things I discover in terms of web dev, some of which might be actually useful to others

So far I have mostly written about events or talks I've been to. I want to carry on doing that, but also write about things I learned in web development. And it could also be a personal diary as well, to record some thoughts I have about certain things. I think that's what I will do for now. I won't announce any posts on Twitter for a while. Just to see where this all goes without the pressure of pointing people to it. That's what I've always liked about the web. You never know who is going to read what you write. It can be private and public at the same time.

I won't write a "Plans for 2012" post this year by the looks of it, so I will end with a condensed version of that, just to remind me of the things I would like to do. If I look at the past year, it has been a bit of a rollercoaster. There were quite a few low points. I had struggled with two projects and this made me feel quite insecure, but I was also still mourning. Over the previous three years three people I loved and knew from childhood had died, and the first of them had been my father. It is still difficult to accept that all this has happened and there is almost a tendency to not think too much about it, but I have realised that it was on my mind nevertheless, and it takes time to come to terms with these deaths. This is probably not the whole story even, in any case my morale, my productivity and ability to focus were not always at their best in the past year.

Still, if anything I have become more certain that web development is what I want to do. I hope that this year I will manage to move a further step forward in either working together with people more, get a job(!) or… since August last year I cannot quite get this out of my mind. But so much money. And would it work timewise? Many questions, but it might be an option.

Another goal is to pass on my knowledge to others. I would really like to do that. I sometimes think I don't know enough yet, but maybe that is not even true. I hope there will be opportunities in the not so distant future.

Otherwise:

• Skills: I have recently switched to Linux (Ubuntu) as my OS, and am really happy with it. I want to learn more about that, and hopefully I can move away from shared hosting to a self-administered server some time. That would be great. Otherwise I'd like to improve my Javascript, and progress with my Python for Software Design book. Generally the goal "improved programming" from last year remains.
  
• Projects: For the moment I am working on two projects that I have inherited and that I feel are at the right level of my programming expertise. I also commited myself to do another community bilingual website. I also hope to do something mobile-focused. I expect there to be some other small websites over the year, but nothing bigger. I might start looking for jobs though!
  
• Conferences: I plan to go to the dev8d days in February, and to Over the Air. I might leave dConstruct this year. I was thinking I should go to something in Berlin really, it's easy to get there from here, and there seem to be interesting things going on. Oh, and the Web Dev conference in Bristol. That's even easier to get to!