Welcome to my brand new home: johnkolbert.com. With the start of a new year I felt that I needed a brand new start. I created johnkolbert.com with the intent that it would be home to my freelance work, namely my client portfolio and the free tools I release, and the occasional technology musing or tutorial. Previous WordPress plugins that I’ve developed will be migrated and hosted here. I don’t promise daily updates, but I do promise quality writing, superior freelance work, and great tutorials. To get the most out of it, I recommend subscribing to my RSS feed and following me on Twitter.

Why the changes? I’ve come to a few realizations over the past several months that have made me re-evaluate my goals and focus for both my blogging and my freelance work. Here’s some realizations and what they mean for my other projects:

Freelance Work

My new focus is going to be mainly on freelance WordPress development. Freelancing helps me pay for dental school while doing what I love. I’m going to detail and feature all (when allowed) projects here, regardless of how big or small they are. I hope a major part of my blogging will be detailing what I’m working on, how I accomplished it, and what the results were. Because I am in dental school, however, I will be taking a limited number of projects each month. I’m going to focus mainly on custom plugin development but will also do theme modifications, installations, and HTML to WordPress conversions. Unfortunately my time won’t allow for full theme development projects as of writing this. Feel free to check out my current rates and request a no-obligation estimate for your project.

Simply-Basic

Update 5/6/2009: Simply-Basic is no longer online

After much thought and consideration I’ve decided to stop updating Simply-Basic. This will allow me more time to focus on freelance work without feeling guilty for not updating another site. Simply-Basic was my first home and the start to my blogging online. It’s where I created many close relationships, honed my skills as a WordPress developer, and really started as a freelancer. Unfortunately, I made many mistakes on Simply-Basic. But I feel I’ve learned a lot from them. Here’s a few mistakes I’ve made and what I’ve learned from them.

• Frequent design and layout changes (some of them looked really bad). It’s very disorienting to readers to have the layout of the blog change every few weeks. My problem is I love to tinker with code and change things up. I got a few complaints and questions on why it kept changing. What did I learn? Find a theme. Keep it simple. Leave it alone. One of my favorite phrases: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Lesson learned.
• Infrequent posts. Time is often hard to come by. I kept telling myself I’d update 3-4 times per week. The problem is life gets in the way. When blogging is a hobby it’s often the first thing to get bumped when life gets busy. What did I learn? Set a realistic schedule and inform your readers. If your schedule is to post once per week, tell people that this is a once per week blog. After you come back from a hiatus, just post. Don’t post about why you didn’t post.
• Undelivered promises. Several times I would start a series and not finish it or announce a post was in the works and never get it published. What did I learn? Under promise and over deliver. Don’t announce something unless it’s done, or just publish it with out a pre-announcement.

I’ll leave Simply-Basic online (it only costs $20 a year for the domain) and all the current content there. I will not, however, be transferring old posts over here.

WordPress Plugins

I’ve released a number of WordPress plugins on both Simply-Basic (no longer active) and Techlyzer. In the coming weeks they will be migrated over here. I’m going to go through each plugin one by one and update them to WordPress 2.7. After the update is complete their new home will be found here. All future WordPress releases will be done via this blog.

Techlyzer

A month or so ago I decided I wanted to start creating tutorials in the form of in-depth screen casts. For this project I created Techlyzer to release them all. Unfortunetly, spreading myself thinner was not the answer to my blogging problems. So just as fast as it was created, I’ve ended my Techlyzer experiment. I still hope to create and release screencasts, but they will be done so here on a sporadic basis. I will still publish some PhotoShop tutorials by my good friend Chelsea Stark as well.

What Does It All Mean?

I’ve narrowed my focus, honed my skills, and am ready for a new chapter in my online life. I’m quite excited about what 2009 will bring. Rather then feeling the pressure to publish several short articles a week, I can spend more time detailing in-depth projects, working with clients, and writing long, detailed tutorials. If you’ve followed me this far, you’ll love what’s coming ahead. Here’s to a great new year!

-John