Life tinkering

Hoo boy! More than a month since I did anything on this blog. That tells me something I needed to realize.

I have two substantial, active consulting projects going on right now -- in addition to my recently expanded "day job" at Scripps, itself about a job and a half.

Now, I happen to enjoy my field of work, so that helps make the day job much more good than bad. And I enjoy site design projects. Both clients have been great to work with, but overall, I'm finding consulting "as time allows" really means "take precious time from family, friends and personal health."

So I'm going to stop. Consulting, that is, at least in my current mode of operations, as soon as active projects are closed out. If ever someone were to pitch me a huge, lucrative, multiyear engagement, all bets would be off. But that would also be true if I won the Powerball, and I think the odds are about the same.

Over time, I will introduce money to mouth. I intend to evolve this site back to more of a personal commentary blog, probably even to go back to the days when jaysmall.com was the canonical domain rather than smallinitiatives.com. Both work for this site now, and will when I make the change, but this is just some philosophical housekeeping. For what it's worth, this site as a blog is five years old this month, and the site overall (starting from brochureware) is 11 years old.

I also intend to move the site from WordPress to Drupal. Not that there is anything wrong with WordPress. Repeat: Not that there is anything wrong with WordPress. It is state-of-the-art blogware and could, I believe, be used for lots of content management requirements. I will continue to tend WordPress installations for, among others, my brother's possibly perpetual presidential campaign.

But in my Scripps duties, I've been pushing hard for using Drupal as a "release valve" to get pilot projects done quickly when social interaction tools and methods are key components of those projects. So again, money, meet mouth. I can use my own site as a lab to keep my knowledge of Drupal relatively sharp (for me, anyway).

None of this will happen today or tomorrow, but keep an eye out: once I close on the current projects, I'll take the Small Initiatives shingle down. Then perhaps I'll have enough time to post some media commentary here that goes beyond the introspective, personal announcements that dominated the past three months. I have to believe most of the tens of people in this blog's little community would prefer that.