2006, Obligatory Year-In-Review

‘Tis that time again, when one reflects on the past year and begins planning for the year to come. Looking back on this year’s blog archives I notice once major theme: I didn’t say much. Alas, almost the entire year passed in a wholly unremarkable way, right up until October when everything happened all at once.

I’d been unhappy in my day job for some time but lacked the opportunity or conviction to do much about it. Finally, two events spurred me to action: Aaron Gustafson asked if I was available to work on a project he had coming up, and Chris Mills asked if I was available to contribute to an upcoming book from Apress. I said yes to both, and then quit my job.

Since then it’s been a bit of a whirlwind. The original project Aaron pulled me on board for is underway, though my role on that project won’t kick into gear until next month. Meanwhile I’ve worked on two other projects with Aaron, one as a contractor for Adaptive Path. I’m not at liberty to divulge details about any of those projects at this time, but it’s been keeping me busy and giving me hope that this freelance thing might work out after all.

As for the other big event, well I’ve been holding off on that formal announcement as well. And while I should probably clear it with Apress before going into specific details here, I don’t think I’ll get in too much trouble for some early promotion of the book. I’m contributing four chapters to Beginning HTML with CSS and XHTML: Modern Guide and Reference, co-authoring with David Schultz. My name isn’t yet listed as an author, either on Apress.com or Amazon.com where it’s already available for pre-order. My progress has been slower than I’d prefer. I never imagined writing would be so labor-intensive, but I don’t want to cut corners and sacrifice thoroughness and quality. Apologies to my editors and co-author, I’m working as hard as I can, I swear. It’s currently slated to hit shelves in April 2007.

As one might guess from the title, it’s a book aimed at beginners learning how to build websites with XHTML and CSS, and teaches modern best practices from the ground up. This title will serve as a precursor to Simon Collison‘s Beginning CSS Web Development and Chris Heilmann‘s Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and AJAX, laying the essential groundwork of solid, semantic markup that those slightly more advanced books rely on.

The one other news item from ’06 worth mentioning is yet another thing that won’t manifest until ’07. I’ve submitted an article to A List Apart, which has been tentatively approved though I don’t yet know when it’ll go live. I’m hoping it’s well received.

So now for the annual unordered list recap:

• I bought a Mac.
• I got naked with several hundred other web geeks. This was only notable because a screenshot of my denuded weblog somehow ended up in Malarkey’s beautiful book.
• I gave a pair of presentations on web standards at my former workplace.
• I proposed a presentation for SXSWi 2007, but didn’t make the cut.
• Best techie book: Transcending CSS, by Andy Clarke.
• Best non-techie book: Company, by Max Barry.
• Best software: TextMate.
• Best web-based time-sink: Twitter.
• Best bad movie: Slither.
• Worst good movie: A Prairie Home Companion.
• Best movie I didn’t see: Little Miss Sunshine.
• Most disappointing movie that could have been so much better: Superman Returns.
• Best business contact: Aaron Gustafson.
• Best dinner companion: Aaron Gustafson.
• Best career revival: Mike Nelson’s RiffTrax.
• Best RiffTrax: Star Trek V.
• Best minute: October 27th, 4:25PM

And resolutions for 2007? To finish what I’ve started.