Looking forward to 2010

A little late, I thought I would kick off the new year here on rachelandrew.co.uk with a round up of last year and some hints as to what I might be up to during 2010.

Despite the recession 2009 was a good year at edgeofmyseat.com. We launched our mini Content Management System, Perch, at the end of May and the success of this little product, designed to fulfill a need we had, has been quite amazing. In addition to Perch we have had our best year yet for development work, with several sites launched on our main CMS framework, a web application currently under development and are working with some great clients.

On the writing front my CSS Anthology third edition was published. Having a third edition of a book of mine on the shelves makes me feel almost as old as the fact that my daughter will turn 13 this year. Technical book release cycles are pretty short, but even so a third edition seems quite something. Right at the end of the year I published an article on 24ways. I am more choosy about my writing projects these days, writing books and magazine articles is incredibly time-consuming, and while I do enjoy it, the projects have to really excite me these days to make me want to consider giving up the time I know they will take.

So to 2010. In terms of the business I think Perch will be a big feature of life at edgeofmyseat.com this year, as we continue to work with the ideas our customers have brought to improve the product. The feedback from customers has been great and our challenge now is to add features to the product without taking away from our initial goal of it being incredibly simple to install and get started with. On the services side of the business I hope that we can continue to build relationships with design agencies and individual designers who want to do web stuff well, and really want to work in partnership with us to produce the best possible end result for each job.

2010 should see me writing a lot more here as I have foolhardily signed up to project52 – committing to add new content to this site at least once a week in 2010. We’ll see how that goes, however with taking on fewer writing projects of late I feel I have to some extent got out of the habit of writing. Something like project52 might just be the push I need to start publishing things here regularly again. The business articles I posted last year were well received so I may write up some more of the things I have learned in almost 9 years of running edgeofmyseat.com. I have also been working on another book project, this time something that I will probably self-publish as an ebook. Watch this space for more news about that as I hope to be able to start talking about it in the coming months.

I’m hoping to get out of the office a bit more this year, lining up a couple of speaking engagements, and also attending more events. As something of an introvert I do tend to use the excuse of being too busy with work or with driving my daughter around to avoid going to social events or conferences however I always do, “enjoy it when I get there”. I just need to remember that fact when I am coming up with an excellent reason why I can’t go into London for something interesting that is happening!

In my personal life I am fortunate to work with my husband and to be able to arrange my work hours and location to spend time with my daughter. I should never forget how lucky I am to be in that position. At times I feel like my daughter’s social secretary but she has some lovely friends and it is a joy to see them all growing up and becoming a really friendly and confident bunch of young people. In addition to spending time with her I hope to do more photography in 2010, experimenting more with Macro photography and my new interest of Digiscoping. Perhaps I’ll write up some of my photography experiments as part of project52.