LornaJane

I was going to skip the essay thing and just write a quick "Happy New Year" post, but then I read last year's entry and couldn't help remembering how far I've come in what is really a short space of time. Two years ago I had no job and was about to move to Leeds, and this time last year we were in despair over the house buying problems.

Career

This year I changed jobs in the spring, to go and work for a small web agency (they think they're a digital marketing agency but I'm not convinced) as a web developer. More interesting than the job side of things is that this year, I met the PHP community.

PHP People

I haven't met the whole community, and hardly any of them in person, but meet them I did. Through phpwomen.org I have a mentor, the lovely Ligaya and she initially suggested I spend more time in IRC since that's where things happen. Usually I can be found on freenode in the #phpc and #phpwomen channels. In February I met Cal Evans, at the PHPLondon conference. This was a fabulous conference and I also met a few other people, including monxton from phpwomen and also Rasmus Lerdorf (father of PHP) although I was too overwhelmed to say anything to him! Since then I've made loads of friends and learned a lot from this community. In November I attended the International PHP Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, and wrote about it for phpwomen. While there I attended some good sessions (of both conference and drinking varieties) and also got to meet lots of people - some friends that I knew already but hadn't met in real life, and some other new friends. I know the people I met this year will be a big influence on 2008 for me.

Home

This time last year we'd had all our belongings in storage for almost a year and had two house sales fall through in four months. Well, it took another failed sale and a full 5 months but we finally did it and bought our first house in May 2007. For the full saga (and a saga it was) read the house category posts, I warn you it does take some reading! Anyway we are now in possession of a 4-bedroomed house, set over four floors, with two bathrooms, gardens and a garage. Notably it has the kitchen in the basement, which floodes, and we bought the contents of the house, which we hadn't really planned for. Since buying the house we have had people in to patch up the roof and guttering, fit central heating, and totally rewire the house. We're now at a point where the brick dust and missing floors are gone and we can start getting the place straight. Plastering, carpentry and decorating skills are now in demand and at some point we need to figure out how to choose, purchase and lay floors. At the moment the house looks like a disaster area but the place is really growing on me and we really are making progress, even if that's not obvious to outsiders at the moment!

Website

Last year I did a whole round-up of the site and how I was getting on with it. I can't see me getting around to it this year, mostly because its not that interesting but rest assured that the bulk of my traffic is visiting the recipe pages! Here's a quick snap of the dashboard of the google analytics tool for this site, things seem to be a bit quiet over the summer, but maybe that's because I posted less at that time.

In Conclusion

2007 was a very good year, here's to 2008 :)

Tomorrow marks the winter solstice, the shortest day. Already we've reached the deepest, darkest part of the year (and its not all that dark, I'm only 53 degrees above the equator). Now begins the longer days and lighter nights, taking us through to summer time - yay :)

Its my birthday today, I have the day off and will be pottering about doing many things that don't involve working :)

I've had a few requests recently to exchange links or to add people to my blogroll, its a way of giving a bit of kudos to people that you admire and whose work you read. The thing is, I don't have a blogroll, and if I did I fear it would cause more problem than it solves. As a minimum, I'd need to consider:

• where to put it on the site, its already quite cluttered
• who should go on it
• how to maintain it to reflect my reading habits as they evolve - maybe a direct link to my feed reader?
• how do I prune it if it gets too big? Its like deleting friends from your phone but much much more public!

Its not that I don't want to share some link love around either - there are many blogs I read that I'd like to own up to loving. Including (but not limited to) GirlsCantWhat, PHPWomen, Lig, Sara, Davey, Matthew, Jon, Ubuntu Tutorials, DevZone, Simon, DevChix and of course XKCD and Dilbert.

Is it a problem if I don't have a blogroll? I quite like my site the way it is, I enjoy reading other people's sites too and I share my appreciation usually through commenting. I'm not sure I should add something like this when I clearly don't have the enthusiasm for it, what do you think?

I'm in Germany for a few days at the IPC and since we had some time spare I've been exploring!

First of all, we took trip into Frankfurt itself yesterday. The queue for the ticket office was wildly long but some people who had a weekend travel pass and had returned to the airport to catch a flight gave us their train tickets which was really lucky (and nice of them).

Once in Frankfurt I put my card in the cash machine to get some money out - we decided it would be better to take money out on demand rather than changing it before we travelled. I had a bit of a deja vu moment when I put in my card and out came strange-looking money ... its just like going to Scotland really :)

We were quite lucky as apparently Frankfurt is usually completely closed on a Sunday (I didn't know that) but it was a special day of some description so all the shops were open in the afternoon. Its too early for the Christmas Markets but there were plenty of sausages and Gluhwein stalls on the streets all the same. Loads of the cafes had tables on the street - personally I think its too cold in Northern Europe in November for that but we ate outside all the same and it seemed a popular choice. We took some photos but they will have to wait until I get home to my own computer and a faster net connection!

Today we've been into the local place, Morfelden, which is tiny but has nice cafes and so on. I even managed to sniff out the wool shop and couldn't resist buying a couple of balls of wool! I'll knit something to remind me of my visit here I think, not sure what though.

Recently we had a week's holiday with the family in Scotland, which was lovely and quite relaxing as we were right out in Dumfries almost in Stranraer and there really isn't a lot to do there! Its beautiful though and we were really lucky with the weather.



We actually took quite a lot of photos but I've uploaded them to flickr account and can't be bothered to upload them again so pop over there and take a look at anything tagged "scotland".