Still not much progress from my end of the journals, sadly. I seem to have been constantly busy with things, but haven't made a lot of progress on any of the things that really count. It's mainly been fighting through waves of administration and busy work while my "to do" list grows every longer. I suspect I'm just coasting on busy work right now, putting off the hard thought required to start another leg of proper progress. Hopefully if I put a few more tweaks into my routine I can identify the important things from the busy work and feel a bit happier about my progress. I'll see how that goes for this week.
In terms of game dev related work, my main focus has been on drawing practice. I seem to be happier drawing than programming for the last week or so; not sure why. I'm hoping to bump my drawing skills up a notch this year, and have a few ideas floating around for how best to do that. For now, I'm only doing pencil cartoon sketches, but I plan on experimenting with Inkscape on my MacBook Pro to see how it goes.
I've also spent a bit too long with idle daydreaming about plans for the rest of the year. While the GDNet downtime has put a crimp in my forum browsing here, it hasn't put a dent on my idle flicking through Wikipedia. Accursed Wikipedia, with your endless pages of mesmorising trivia!
Web Hosting
One thing I've always been meaning to do is look into starting my own website. Eventually I'll need to figure out the basics of how to maintain my own website, and since every munchkin and their pet iguana seems to be on the 'Net these days I guess it can't be that difficult to do.
My main concern at the moment is that I'm fairly clueless about the whole process. There seems to be scores of web hosts out there, all with a bewildering array of features, and I'm uncertain about exactly what I need. More research is needed before I make an intelligent decision about a good host.
While I mentioned starting a website, I'm actually thinking of starting a few websites for different purposes. My plan is to start off with a personal experiment site, a duplicate in functionality to what I have here at GDNet; somewhere where I can post my own files for people to access over the internet, put up another journal and forum software, all done for the experience of how to manage a simple website.
Once I can do that, I've got a real itch to start my own webcomic - not only will it be a fun exercise, but it seem a great way to get some good drawing practice. I guess this will require a second website, and I'll need to pick a host that has reasonable bandwidth requirements to cope with downloads of large image files.
Finally, I would like to start my own indie game company someday once I get my games up to a sellable standard, so I would eventually need to start my own company site. If I run the other two sites for long enough I should have enough practice to set up something of a decent enough standard to be a good internet business site. This wouldn't be for some time as I have a lot of work to do to reach that level, but I'm planning for that goal.
I'm still scanning the internet for info on good web hosts. There have been a few posts here on the Web Development forum that I've read, and there seem to be a number of good companies out there that will probably suit my needs. I'll probably draft an extended post for that forum later in the week once I've got enough info to pose an intelligent question, as I'd like to get some input from those who have already had experience running their own sites as to what hidden aspects I might be overlooking (such as technical support, particularly if I go with a host in a different time zone).
Lots to do then, and increasingly less time to do it in. This year's starting to look like a marathon slog, and we haven't made it eight weeks in yet.
P.S. Before I forget, tomorrow's my birthday. Happy birthday, me. Only one more year before I reach the big Three-Oh. I'd always planned to have figured out what I wanted to do with my life by age thirty, but judging from my present level of confusion that's going to be a tough milestone to meet.
