My Year in Review - 2021 Edition

2021 in General

To start off, 2021 went much better than 2020 for me. Even though COVID-19 is still a worldwide problem and the pandemic is far from over, I was able to accomplish a lot more than I though I would. This was both professionally and personally.

I would have to say that my biggest accomplishment in 2021 was the completion and the publication of my first book, Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server - First Edition. This was a project that I had started in the fall of 2020, and completing it was a huge relief. Now that it is completed, I can now focus on new things going into 2022. I have really neglected posting on this website as a result of that project, as I wanted to commit to finishing it before I started anything else. I have no regrets for neglecting this website, but I will make more of an effort in 2022 to post more often.

This Website in Statistics

Even though I did not post very often in 2021, I did have a record year for page views. The entire Certificate Authority in Windows Server 2019 guide did extremely well once again, as well as the LaTeX with Visual Studio Code guide which has also remained popular.

Since migrating to Hugo and Netlify, I find the statistics provided by Netlify to be much more useful. I was able to track down several issues that were not obvious with WordPress, and was able to fix them without too many issues. WordPress tends to suppress a lot of those errors from the end user, so it was not obvious that they were occurring which was frustrating to say the least.

Despite the record page views in 2021, I am still never going to use advertisements on this website. I make an effort to block advertisements on the Internet, so it would be hypocritical of me to expect people to not do that to me. Since I use Hugo and Netlify, the site costs me nothing to operate (with the exception of the domain hosting), so it really doesn’t matter to me.

Professional and Personal Life

Similar to 2020, things went well for me considering everything else that was going on. I have continued to work from home as a result of COVID-19. I did manage to travel for work to the US several times in the summer and fall, but I did not feel comfortable at all during those trips, so I will avoid that in 2022 unless absolutely necessary.

I feel as though I haven’t done much professionally since the pandemic began, and I am going to make it a priority to focus more on my career in 2022.

Personally, I am also going to make more of an effort to take extended time off this year and try to focus on things not at all related to my work.

Website Changes

The original tagline for this website was “Networking, System Administration and Other Stuff”, but I no longer feel like that is relevant so I removed it. I also feel the tagline was something I just made up to fill a box in WordPress while I was setting it up, and since I don’t WordPress anymore I can get rid of it. Good riddance I guess, the less remnants from WordPress that I keep around the better.

2022 Goals

During the pandemic I purchased a lot of “Retro” computers and devices off of eBay and Kijiji that I wanted to do restoration on just for something to do during the various lockdowns. I wanted to collect a lot of the computers and devices that I had back in the early 2000’s as I had gotten rid of them over the years for various reasons, and I guess I was feeling nostalgic. Window shopping on eBay while watching Netflix is never a good idea. I’m not really planning on making any posts on them as it isn’t really that interesting (go to YouTube for things like that), but I may make a post on one of them.

I am planning on updating my website for Ten Fifteen Solutions which I launched several years ago. My recent migration to Hugo and Netlify showed me how easy it is, and the website is in desperate need of an update so I am going to work on that over the next few weeks. It is also the last website I run that uses WordPress, so I am highly motivated to get rid of it.

I am also going to attempt to cleanup a lot of my personal data and devices. I realized at the end of 2021 that I had somehow ended up with 3 daily driver laptops, and that was just a bit excessive for my liking. I store all of my data online and don’t really rely on any specific device to get things done, so I am going to work to get it down to a phone and a laptop. Everything else should be non-critical and not necessary.

On top of all of that, I am going to try my best to stay safe and healthy, which is the most important thing that I can do.

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