Future direction of carlgalloway.com

Hello everyone, let me thank all my regular site visitors for their continued support over the last year, today actually marks the one year anniversary of this blog and I wouldn't have had the motivation to keep going if you hadn't subscribed to my feed, made lots a great comments about my entries, supported my template experiments, and generally made me feel like I'm part of something that has a future.

I've been doing a lot of thinking about the direction of this blog, a one year anniversary kinda does that, and the conclusion I've reached is that this blog is now ready for some changes. Ceejay and I are making good progress towards our plan of become global travellers which is really exciting and also a little daunting.

So our future, and the future of this blog is assured, we've decided that we are now ready to expand this blog in directions we never expected to take it. Over the next few months we plan to index all our tutorials and add more. A long time ago someone suggested I should write a book about Serendipity. Well, I really thought about it, and in the end I've decided that actually is a great idea, but with a twist. I'm going to write out a bunch of tutorials that will collectively become a book, but it will be made freely available to Serendipity users to download. Over the next few days I'll expand on this a bit more, but I need comments and feedback from Serendipity users so we can start the ball rolling. I am also considering donating the copyright of this to the Serendipity developers, but I guess we need to get the project off the ground first.

Many Serendipity users have approached me over the last few months to help them manage their blogs by setting up their database for them, or configuring plugins, customising templates etc. I'm happy to say that I'll be doing all of this, and I'm considering offering a very affordable hosting solution for Serendipity blogs as well. I haven't fully developed the idea but if I get enough interest then I'll make another announcement next month.

Now that I am fully retired, I'm going to develop a second book which has nothing to do with Serendipity. For many years now I've been a mentor to small business owners, a counsellor, and a motivator. I'll be putting together my thoughts into a book that I plan to publish in the next couple of years. Part of my blog will focus on sharing some of these concepts with site visitors. Probably my categories and tags will need to change again, and I'll be working on a new template for this site to showcase some of Serendipity's great features.

So, once again, thanks to everyone who has helped grow this blog so much, especially Matthias who translated the bulk of the tutorials, and if you have suggestions for improvements, opportunities, or if you would like to contribute ideas or tutorials of your own, please comment or send me an email from my contact form.

Carl and Ceejay