I normally write a end of the year post summing up my plans for the year (inevitably to write more) and talk about plans for the blog. Though this year I missed it in part due to work and home being busy and also the question on the value in blogging. I started this blog ten years ago while in grad school to help form my opinions on librarianship and help with my writing. Since then it has been a steady 1 post per month cycle about librarianship, libraries, technology (Apple), and other topics that I find interesting.


2018 had been an interesting year. I did end writing the newsletter I wrote about in my end of the year last year though it did not go well. I produced a few issues though I ended up being a lot less comfortable with the closed nature of distribution model (i.e. people have to opt in to the receive the email) while what I still love about the blog (caveats from last years lost aside) it is open and anyone can find this blog with the right address.


I wrote 13 posts last year, which is slightly less then my most prolific year and aligns closely to my once a month schedule that I seem unable to improve. I have moved away from writing about Apple (save for a single post on airpods) and wrote about alternative careers in librarianship, continuing professional development, and my foray into user research. I think I will continue with my forecast that I would like to write more though from the data about one post a month seems to be my schedule (albeit I am now behind for 2019 due to losing the first part of the year).


This year I have a few goals in mind for a personal information management perspective. The first being to manage my photos better as I have not done a good job maintaining my photo library and my photo volume has ballooned since getting married and having children. (Part of this would be a photography course as I am
truly a terrible photographer.) Secondly, I would like to move away from blogger as a platform as it is clear from the creepiness that it is not a priority for Google to keep maintaining it. Some of the images from early posts are missing completely, which would be a decade ago now though I have only around a hundred posts so it shouldn’t be that hard to maintain. I leaning toward a hosted Wordpress. I installation as that is what Automattic does so it is in their best interest keep their blogs running(even micro blogs like mine). I would probably break all my blog post links that refer back to the blog and would require some transfer process. (Since I have only around 100 posts I would probably port them manually via markdown and then upload them to Wordpress manually to match the posting schedule in Blogger. It would be easy; just time consuming.


In terms of professional goals I would like to work a taxonomy for all our queries at work so we can better understand what queries we’re maintaining and users can more easily find them. I would also like to spend somtime trying to figure out Python as the langauge seems super useful when mangling large text files.


While this post is late I do hope I can keep writing too as there is something about creation that feeds the soul.