TODO for February 2012

In January I started to write annual and monthly reports and TODO lists. On one hand, I hope that this will help me track my progress and on the other hand it lets you, my reader, take a look at my plans and participate in the journey.

Excuses

January was a short but busy month as I was on skiing vacation with my children for 10 days. Luckily the owners of the B&B (Zimmer) had installed wifi so I could at least handle some of my e-mails and I could post the Perl Weekly.

I also had a lot of things piled up from December when my mother was visiting us and my children were at home and with my sister we also organized a surprise birthday party for her. In Budapest.

Finally, I had 4 days Perl training at a client. Which is awesome.

January report

1. I made some progress in the Perl Maven video recording but far from what I've planned.
2. I wrote 6 technical articles on szabgab.com and one about the Perl Weekly.
3. Published 2 articles on the Code Project site.
4. The PDF version of the Perl Maven course still needs fixing though I made sime little progress
5. The Israeli Perl Workshop still only has Booking.com as external sponsor.

Unplanned changes

These were not specifically planned but I think its worth mentioning.

I started to promote the Perl Weekly on 3 social networks. This might have had a bad effect on the a number of new subscribers of the mailing list itself as it grew less than I was hoping. On the Perl Weekly mailing list there are now 2544 members with 424 RSS subscribers. That means the mailing list only grew by 168 people and the RSS feed actually decreased by 24.

OTOH

On Twitter the @perlweekly has 173 followers.

On Google+ 173 people put Perl Weekly in their circles.

On Facebook 78 people liked the Perl Weekly.

So it seems there are some more people interested in immediate updates while I have not worked hard enough to attract the folks who prefer mailing lists.

Plans for February 2012

It seems I am going to have 8 or even 12 Perl training days in February and we are having the Israeli Perl Workshop as well, at the end of the month.

So probably I won't be able to do a lot of other work. Nevertheless let's list some items I'd like to do:

1. I have to go on with the 3 Perl Maven video courses.
2. Finish the PDF version of the Beginner Perl Maven courses, setup a way for people to buy it, and start selling them while keeping the HTML version free of charge. This is similar to what Zed A. Shaw does with Learn Python The Hard Way.
3. Make sure the Israeli Perl Workshop brings in many new people to our community.
4. Post 4-5 technical articles on szabgab.com and 1-2 articles guest-posting elsewhere.
5. Check out how to run live video courses based on the suggestions I got from Peter Cooper who runs the Ruby Reloaded course. Robin Smidsrød also suggested live streaming of coding sessions via Justin.tv I should experiment with. In this month I'd like to make sure I can technically run such courses or coding sessions and decide which one to do first.

That's enough of planning for now. I think I have a lot of other things I need to do but I need to prioritize.