I’ve spread myself too thin. Inspired by Tantek’s What to do with things to do, I have decided to prune and close several projects:

So what am I working on? Well, we’re in crunch mode leading up to a major release in my day job, I’m getting married in less than a week, and then Dora and I are leaving the country for two weeks, and that’s only the stuff I’m telling you about. So I’m a little busy.

When I get back in June, I hope to be doing less blogging, but more writing. Specifically, I’d like to focus on 3 things:

  1. Writing HOWTO articles about accessibility and web standards, to be published by the Web Standards Project.
  2. Personal writing (filling out 100 stories of unfamous people).
  3. Following and contributing to the current effort to standardize RSS (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11). My contribution will likely take the form of sitting back and waiting for a consensus to emerge on RSS best practices, and then implementing the appropriate rules as an optional add-on to the RSS validator.

We’ll see how that goes; as any good writer will tell you, blogging is writer’s crack. But at least it’s a plan, which is more than I’ve had in a while.

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Fourteen comments here (latest comments)

  1. Mark: But as far as Dave and Ben go, it doesn’t look like the goal is to “standardize RSS”. It’s to create an industry-specific profile of RSS elements that all blog apps should produce. It will only have an impact on those who want to claim they support “RSS for Weblogs”, not RSS in general.

    You no doubt understand that, but I’m seeing a lot of people assuming that this has something to do with RSS as a whole, which doesn’t seem to be the real intent. As Dave pointed out, nothing that’s being talked about should have any impact at all on how, say, the Times produces its feeds.

    — Roger Benningfield #

  2. Bravo Mark.

    — Mike Watkins #

  3. I’m sorry to hear that about Dive Into Python – just last week I was trying to grok unit testing and remembered that DiP covered it. I re-read that chapter and it just clicked, so I showed it to several friends on my course at Uni and it clicked for them as well. It reminded me what a truly fantastic resource Dive Into Python is.

    Congratulations on your pruning efforts. All of the projects you have listed seem to work just fine as they are, although I have to admit I would dearly love to see the end of chapter 7.

    — Simon Willison #

  4. In such a moment, a look at the history of some of the projects now entered in maintenance mode could just put the reader in the right mood…

    http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/08/04/dive_into_history.html

    It has been a long road, but I think we all (makers and readers) have been fun and enjoyed ourselves.

    — Giulio Piancastelli #

  5. “My contribution will likely take the form of ’sitting back and waiting for a consensus to emerge’ on RSS best practices, and then implementing the appropriate rules as an optional add-on to the RSS validator.”

    And don’t forget building valid MovableType templates! :)

    http://feeds.archive.org/validator/docs/howto/MovableType.html

    Again, congrats on the wedding! I hope you and Dora are a lot more prepared 1 week away from the wedding than Sarah and I were. I was physicaly ill the Tuesday before the Saturday I got married because of all the stress. It was a pretty bad week over all, but the day itself was *so* worth it.

    — Ken Walker #

  6. Glad to see that “less blogging, but more writing”, and glad too you’d want to write more of “100 stories of unfamous people”, I like it, thanks :).

    — yowkee #

  7. I am sad to hear about the demise of http://diveintopython.org … After repeatedly giving up on python, It was your site that made me finally sit and learn python.

    Congrats on your marriage and have a great life :-)

    — anand #

  8. Um. DiP isn’t going away, as I understand it, It’s just remaining where it is from now on :-)

    — Aquarion #

  9. Thanks for all the work you’ve put into Dive Into Python. It’s a great resource, even in its present form.

    — Alan Green #

  10. IokanaaN - Blog (trackback)
  11. Sam Ruby (trackback)
  12. IokanaaN - Blog (trackback)

  13. Looking at the comments so far, it seems like Dive Into Python has had the greatest impact. And I have to agree, DiP is what brought me from programming Python like Java to starting to understand (and program) idiomatic Python.

    Would it be too much to ask that you turn over Dive Into Python to another author/maintainer, or make it into a community effort? I think a lot of folks would love to see more material. If need be, I’ll take over maintenance, but I’m not enough of a programmer yet to add significant content — though I can edit, and make suggestions for content I’d like to see written.

    Thanks again for the work you’ve done.

    — phoukka #

  14. El Refugio (trackback)

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