You may have noticed lately that I haven’t been posting a lot. Because, well, I’m extremely busy.

Something about teaching, two advisorships (including the yearbook), home ownership, and two graduate classes just sucks the energy out of me. When I make it home, if I don’t have work to do for school or around the house, I just don’t have the energy to sit down and write. For a while, I was doing some short pieces about Fallout 3 in the Nerds at Play category, but I couldn’t muster enough oomph to dive into any deep articles about education or web design.

Although I love blogging, and I really hoped that combining all of these sites into one site would help me keep up with it, it doesn’t fit into my life at the moment. Too much going on.

However, I’m still not ready to just drop the whole web dev bug altogether. Which means it’s time for a new direction.

One problem I’ve found with a blog is that there’s a push to post regularly. What good is subscribing to a blog if there are no posts for weeks at a time? I know I’ve unsubscribed from other people’s sites because of weeks of downtime.

Instead of blogging – at least as a main venture – I’ve decided to shift to smaller, one-off sites. Theses mini-sites will probably be 5-20 pages in size, and they probably won’t include a blog/weekly articles section.

Why Shift from a Blog to Static Sites?

First, I’m not pressured to work regularly. When I have a lull from my other responsibilities, I can sit down and work on a site. If I’m busy, I can wait a week or two. There’s no pressure to have it done right now.

Second, it’ll let me work on my web development skills. Since creating this site, I haven’t done a lot of fiddling with designs and programming. Creating new sites every month or two will give me an excuse to break out some of those design skills and sharpen them.

Third, I can create some revenue through text links like TNX. I’ve ear-marked online revenue for electronics and supplies that I use in the classroom, so I’d like to continue to make some extra pocket cash this year. I think this mini-site model will yield more profit per time invested.

So No Blogging… At All?

I wouldn’t say that. It’s just not going to be my main project.

I definitely want to create a sustainable education blog. As I get started on this doctoral program, I know that I need to get out there and get my name and my work recognized by a larger audience than my Rutgers professors. I’m unsure if it’ll be here or located somewhere else, but in the next year or so I definitely plan on working on that.

I’ll probably also create a minimalistic personal blog to track all of my projects. I may re-vamp this site over the summer to fulfill that role. I’ll write quick updates about new projects going up, share lessons learned about web dev, and ponder about new project topics. It’ll more or less be a place for self-reflection about the whole process.

So… don’t expect to see a lot around here in the near future. I may stop in from time to time, but the days of posting something on a daily basis are unfortunately gone. They were fun, but short lived.