It’s been a year since I’ve updated this blog. What the hell have I been doing in that time?

Well… my daughter was born, I sold my house, bought a new house, took lots of photos, reentered and won the contest I talked about in my previous post, became much better at photoshop, reviewed a book for Packt Pub, grew a beard, shaved it, and started learning how to use video editing software.

This site has remained on my mind though. In the background of my other activities I think about what I could be doing with it. I’ve been at a stalemate about where to go with it though. When working on it started to feel like work, I drifted away.

In my absence this site has somehow seen it’s best year yet. Traffic is up more than 50% from last year… though truth be told, a big part of that increase in traffic is due to the run away success of my old Snake app. Why that app took off late last year I have no idea. It sat around collecting dust for the longest time, and then slowly started amassing a following. It’s even made an appearance in a CS lab in Ireland. One of my friends suggested that I start making more games, but I don’t want to be chasing traffic.

For the longest time I’ve had this mentality that this site needs to have a focus around “programming”, but that’s not what this site is. It’s a creative outlet. Some of the blogs I wrote in 2012 and 2013 were pretty dry and written with the mentality of this being a “programming blog”. But it’s not. I’m a programmer, and I blog, but this blog is its best when its organic musings about stuff I find interesting and not stuff I think a potential audience might want to read.

So no more book reviews, product reviews, or overly technical posts. This blog will become just a blog. I may write about something new I’ve done, or I may write about my favorite ice cream flavor. And maybe I’ll start to write more, or maybe you’ll see this as the latest entry in 2017. The goal though, will be for this not to feel like work.

With this change in focus I’ve also decided to change the coupling of patorjk.com and patorjk.com/blog. patorjk.com now gets its own page which focuses on the various things on this domain. This will make this blog feel less like a center piece for this site and more like just another section.

So what does the future hold for patorjk.com? Will there be another long vacation before I do another update? I’m not totally sure. The site is always on my mind though.