This is where I’m spending my time this year:
Full-Time Focus
My full-time focus is on my job. I’m currently employed as the Web Content Officer for the University of Huddersfield, where I write content and advise on information architecture and web analytics.
All views expressed on this website are my own and do not reflect the views of the University.
Part-Time Focus
I work on these projects in my spare time. Some for fun and some for profit.
The Worldbuilding School – A website dedicated to helping authors, artists and game designers build their own fantasy worlds. I write articles, guides, draw maps and create products based around worldbuilding.
Pennine Academy of Dance – This is my Wife’s dance school where I help every Saturday on the reception and front of house. Plus I manage the website and marketing.
She is a fantastic dance teacher with a prestigious list of experience and training. I am of course biased, but you can read her bio to see for yourself.
What I’m Learning
Along with day to day learning these are things I’m specifically focused on learning.
Experiments: This is the way I learn – Create a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Discover what happens. Make adjustments or a new hypothesis. Repeat. I’m starting to document the results from these experiments. When I can’t share detailed results or reporting on older experiments I’ve listed them as case studies.
Video: I’ve long been fascinated by video but never took the serious time to learn video production. So I’ve bought some lighting and a tripod for my phone in order to learn about making videos.
Ghost CMS: I’ve built websites in WordPress since about 2009/2010. It’s still a great platform and I’ll probably use it for a long time to come. However, as I’m doing more in the field of information architecture and content modeling I’d like a web system that gives me more control over the content models I want to build for the content I’m creating. Originally I was looking into Jekyll however I'm testing out Ghost CMS. This website runs off Ghost.
It’s faster than WordPress, has a really nice writing edtior and uses modern web tech. Plus the use of Handlebars.js looks like converting HTML templates for use with will be relatively easy.
I do have some frustrations with the platoform but I'll write a longer post to go into these.
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This “Now” page was last updated in March, 2019. If you want the backstory, check out my about page. The idea for this “Now” page was inspired by Derek Sivers.