2007: The business

posted by Jeff | Tuesday, January 1, 2008, 11:54 AM | comments: 1

As I did last year, I'm going to split my yearly retrospective into the me and the business.

This was a year where I really kind of let myself take a step back and not work that hard on developing the business. That was partly because I wanted to concentrate a bit on my personal life, and partly because I really wanted to explore what its place in my life is. Although it's mostly just because I was lazy.

I started the year getting picked up by Federated Media, which was cool because I thought it meant I'd finally get some decent ads sold that paid at much higher rates. Well, they only sold a handful of campaigns, and some slightly higher remnant stuff, but it wasn't the windfall I really hoped for. The old ad companies of course fail to produce any significant results.

I actually did start to write code again mid-year, and cranked out new image gallery stuff relatively quickly. I even put it up on PointBuzz in its rough form and tweaked it a bit. I had already reached a decent spot with the forum app at the end of the previous year, but it just kind of sat there. I finally put all of the pieces together and launch the new PointBuzz a couple of weeks ago, and I'm mostly happy with it. There are some performance issues regarding indexing that I'm still working out. But overall, Walt and I are sticking to discussion, photos and news, the things people most want from us.

CoasterBuzz of course hasn't changed. I'm not motivated to rebuild it, even though it's in dire need of a face lift. I do have 75% of a new site built, with no design, but I'm just not getting on it.

In terms of skill development, I think that rests more under the personal blog entry, but I'm overall in a much better place than I was before. Problem solving is very much coming easier to me than it used to.

I spoke at IAAPA this year, which wasn't for money or anything, but I'm not sure what that really did for me other than make a resume point. I didn't do it to get consulting work, because frankly I don't really want to do consulting work. Building stuff for other people isn't fun.

Video was not a big component of anything I did this year, but a lot of that can only loosely be considered business related anyway.

I ended the year having more tools and working code available to me for whatever I decide to do next, and that makes me happy. I didn't spend too much money this year either, the only significant purchase being the Adobe CS3 suite. I think I might actually get to a debt-free place this year.


Comments

Alex

January 1, 2008, 6:21 PM #

"I think I might actually get to a debt-free place this year."

Not if Apple has anything to say about it!


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