All Change

Last year I made an important decision: it was time to quit my job.

Regular readers will know that I don't exactly have a job - I've been freelance since I left university, picking up work wherever I found it, mostly working directly for people who want websites. The problem has been that most of my clients' priorities were things like design, content and SEO - but I'm a programmer at heart, so didn't exactly find that enjoyable. Not that you can expect any job to be fun and games all the time, but I also made some terrible decisions which meant I found myself doing really massive chunks of boring work for free. All work and no money makes radiac a dull idiot.

So I decided that it was time for a change. Over the past few months I have completed my outstanding client work, have handed off the larger sites which kept me busy, and I'm now free to spend the next few months working on projects for myself.

The first thing is a new website here at radiac.net. Given my track record with this site I'll probably regret saying this, but I'm aiming to have it ready next Monday - that will be radiac.net's 13th birthday, so seems somewhat appropriate.

I want to get back to writing more diary entries; in 2006, a couple of my clients had mentioned something I'd written about on here, which kinda freaked me out - it was like getting out of the shower to find your boss standing there asking for your TPS report. I changed my work e-mail address so new clients wouldn't know about radiac.net, and decided to write posts assuming that it would be read by everyone I had ever met - but that just meant I'd get halfway through a new post, think about how someone would find it inappropriate or boring, and throw it out without posting. Then I just got out of the habit of writing anything at all; for years I haven't said anything about work, holidays, gaming, my cats - hell, I haven't even ranted about UKIP since 2009.

I'm therefore going to try splitting up my diary into two parts - personal and tech. That way I can put personal stuff on my site for my friends and stalkers, without clogging up the feed for strangers who want to read my tech-related ramblings. I actually started working on this in 2009, when I toyed with the idea of making an entirely separate website, but having two seemed rather egocentric. I'll be publishing separate RSS feeds, but current subscribers will continue to get everything.

I've also worked on a lot of personal projects over the years, with a view to eventually releasing them with an open source license; some have been sitting around for a long time, and the world probably doesn't need another perl framework or django cms now, but I think I've written some bits here and there which others may find useful. Over the next few months I'll be splitting out components, putting them on github, and making mini sites for them here on radiac.net.

And as for a long-term business plan? It's simple - I'm going to make this site so incredibly awesome that I attract a horde of rich patrons who shower me with so much cash that within three months I'll be writing a diary entry describing the mojito I'm drinking on the beach of my private island in the Caribbean. That could happen, right? Yeah! I cannot see how this could possibly fail.

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