I started a tradition in 2010 and 2012 that I am just barely keeping alive (posting on NYE 2013!). Just like last time, I emailed out the write-up to people I've got email addresses for. So if you aren't on that list, you can check out the update on my 2013 in Retrospect page.

A lot definitely happened in 2013, and the update is, once again, lengthy. But it should read quickly and give a pretty good overview.

You can keep up with me next year here on my site, through Facebook, Twitter or through my photos on Flickr or Instagram. Hope your 2013 was a good one and all the best next year.

I started a tradition in 2010 that I promptly abandoned in 2011 because I was too busy. However, I'm back! I just finished a write-up of my 2012 adventures, work and activities. Just like last time, I emailed out the write-up to people I've got email addresses for. So if you aren't on that list, you can check out the update on my 2012 in Retrospect page.

As with last time, this turned out to be a lot longer than I had anticipated. But I'm not a concise writer, and a lot happened that I wanted to talk about! Hopefully the write-up isn't too terrible.

You can keep up with me next year here on my site, through Facebook, Twitter or through my photos on Flickr. Hope your 2012 was a good one and all the best next year.

I recently decided to switch to a static site framework instead of my old Wordpress-based homepage. Since Python is so awesome, I naturally chose Pelican as my static site generator of choice because it is written in Python. I also wanted something that would be easy to host elsewhere for free, like on Heroku. I'm tired of managing a personal server.

A few scripts later, and I had a site that looked just about the same as before, but was fully static. However, I decided to also take the opportunity to refresh the design, and bring it forward. I wanted to keep the dynamic header that's been part of my site for so long, but I didn't want to create custom rectangular photos like I did before. In addition, if I did the rectangular style photos, they wouldn't fit all the way across the width of the page, leaving whitespace on either side of them.

So I took a design cue from Kickstarter and created a grid of images that are automatically pulled from a Flickr tag on my account at compile time. I also added some other custom plugins to look for special Flickr markdown tags in my posts to automatically insert images. The result is a site that should load faster, be smaller, and should also be easier keep updated and experiment with. I still need to rewrite my travel page to fully port my previous homepage over, but that'll be work for another day as that code is really old, and really messy.

As 2010 winds down in the next few days, I decided to write up a summary of my past year in what, some would term, a Christmas letter. Well, it's after Christmas, so this is officially a Review of 2010 letter. I emailed out a link to quite a number of people that I've got email addresses for. So if you aren't on that list, you can find the body of work and associated pictures at my 2010 in Retrospect page.

You can keep up with me next year here on my site and through my photos at Flickr or at my gallery. I'd love to hear how your 2010 went, so write back. Hope your 2010 was a good one and all the best next year.