{"id":3316,"date":"2015-12-22T11:29:22","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T15:29:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/?p=3316"},"modified":"2015-12-22T12:19:17","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T16:19:17","slug":"the-long-vacation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/22\/the-long-vacation\/","title":{"rendered":"The Long Vacation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a year since I&#8217;ve updated this blog. What the hell have I been doing in that time?<\/p>\n<p>Well&#8230; my daughter was born, I sold my house, bought a new house, took lots of photos, reentered and won <a href=\"http:\/\/www.severnaparkvoice.com\/arts-entertainment\/nature-shines-2015-life-park-photo-competition\">the contest<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ve been at a stalemate about where to go with it though. When working on it started to feel like work, I drifted away.<\/p>\n<p>In my absence this site has somehow seen it&#8217;s best year yet. Traffic is up more than 50% from last year&#8230; though truth be told, a big part of that increase in traffic is due to the run away success of my old <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/games\/snake\/\">Snake<\/a> 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&#8217;s even made an appearance in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.ucc.ie\/~dgb\/courses\/wd2\/labs\/lab6\/lab6.html\">CS lab<\/a> in Ireland.  One of my friends suggested that I start making more games, but I don&#8217;t want to be chasing traffic.<\/p>\n<p>For the longest time I&#8217;ve had this mentality that this site needs to have a focus around &#8220;programming&#8221;, but that&#8217;s not what this site is. It&#8217;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 &#8220;programming blog&#8221;. But it&#8217;s not. I&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;ve done, or I may write about my favorite ice cream flavor. And maybe I&#8217;ll start to write more, or maybe you&#8217;ll see this as the latest entry in 2017. The goal though, will be for this not to feel like work.<\/p>\n<p>With this change in focus I&#8217;ve also decided to change the coupling of patorjk.com and patorjk.com\/blog. <a href=\"http:\/\/patorjk.com\/\">patorjk.com<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n<p>So what does the future hold for patorjk.com? Will there be another long vacation before I do another update? I&#8217;m not totally sure. The site is always on my mind though. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s been a year since I&#8217;ve updated this blog. What the hell have I been doing in that time? Well&#8230; 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 &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/2015\/12\/22\/the-long-vacation\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Long Vacation<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3316"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3325,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3316\/revisions\/3325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/patorjk.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}