I’ve wanted to write this post for some time now. Each time I try, I put it off because I don’t feel ready. I’m glad I’ve put it off till now in many ways, as the reasons for wanting to write it have solidified and matured even further over the last few weeks, to the point where I just have to let it out.

Long story short: I’ve conclusively come to the end of a particular road – career-wise at least. The past couple of years leading up to this point have been pretty soul-destroying. However, the new stretch of road ahead is something I’m dizzily giddy about.

Now, I’m not new to finding myself at these kinds of crossroads. It seems roughly every 6 years or so I find myself having taken a particular career-path as far as I want to take it, before making a radical, cavalier, head-first departure into the unknown. Just for kicks.

The last time this happened was early 2003. I was a primary school teacher, a pretty successful one by all accounts too. One day, I just woke up and decided I didn’t want to do it anymore, handed in my notice that day. And only then did I start figuring out what the hell to do next.

I’m a creative, technology-oriented guy so I plumped for figuring out how to build websites as the next step forward. It seemed like it would be great fun, and for quite a while it was. Learning completely from scratch, over the next 6 years or so I carved out a career, built up my own business, worked from home and enjoyed the freedom that comes from not being shackled to an employer. On the face of it, things are great — I have more work coming in than I can handle, with a roster of very happy clients that I enjoy a good relationship with.

The problem is, I’m not happy.

I want to explain why, but I honestly don’t know where to begin. I’m going to have a crack by starting somewhere, anywhere. None of these reasons in themselves are the cause of my wanting to make such a drastic, radical break, it’s just the sum total of each of them.

Just to note: there’s a very happy, positive new beginning at the end of all this.

The reasons are several…

1. My business model is unsustainable. I only get paid when I’m working. When I’m slogging away at the computer, I get paid. When I’m not working, I don’t. While this is not a shameful way to eke out a living, it’s not something I want to carry on doing forever, especially as I’m supposed to be enjoying at least some level of freedom as a result of being self-employed. Aren’t there supposed to be perks?!

   I feel as if I’m actually less free than an employed worker in many ways — the feeling of being stuck on an unstoppable treadmill is becoming unbearable.

   I’m fed up and burnt out — the tail is now very much wagging the dog.

   I could take on employees, sure, delegate the actual work, become a manager, not a maker. But I just don’t want that. I’ve no qualms about managing people per se, just that I don’t want to be tied into the responsibility for other people which that would entail.

   I want to do something different, something with a more sustainable business model, something smarter, something that would still be earning a passive or residual income, even while I’m not sat at my desk. Something, even, that might be of value to sell on in future.

2. Building websites is futile. I’ve come to the decision that, for me at least, building websites is ultimately unsatisfying and unprofitable, a hiding to nothing.

   No matter how well budgeted, no matter how well planned, no matter how well managed, I’ve grown thoroughly and completely tired of how projects seem to spiral out of control. The worst thing is, much of the time it’s seemingly through nobody’s fault. It just seems to be a fact of the job.

   Don’t get me wrong: I certainly don’t mean to say that all projects I work on always go way over time and way over budget — far from it actually. It’s just the niggly stuff that’s outside of everyone’s control that has built up to the point where the straw has definitely broken this camel’s back.

   The days lost to pissing about fixing browser rendering bugs (I’m looking at you Mr Internet Explorer) that pop from out of nowhere just when you think you’re on the home straight. The hosting issues that mean the site that should have taken 20 minutes to transfer to a client’s server ends up taking 4 days (and counting in one current case). The problems with payment gateway providers who decide on a whim to cancel a client’s account (through no fault of the client), leaving me to take up the considerable slack. The contact form that has worked perfectly for 2 years which now suddenly, and without warning, just decides to stop working.

   It smarts the most when this kind of crap inevitably eats into time I’ve promised to spend with the children, time I’ve promised to spend with family and friends.

   I could go on, and on, and on. It’s enthusiasm-sapping, time-wasting stuff, and I’m really tired of it. I need to find something less futile and more fulfilling.

3. I’ve come to dread client communication. My clients are all lovely people and in many cases good personal friends, please don’t misconstrue. But strongly related to my first 2 points, I’ve come to outright dread opening email, answering the telephone or checking Basecamp, to the point of feeling physically sick sometimes.

   I hate to sound negative, but… there just seems to always be something, every single day — sometimes many things — that result in derailing my entire morning / afternoon / day / week, and pretty much every one of those things begins with an email or call from a client.

   It’s not the client’s fault. Usually. It’ll be a bizarre browser bug. A server issue. A change in Google Maps which has suddenly stopped their map appearing. It might be suggestions for some quite radical and time-consuming changes to the agreed scope which, while always re-costed, contribute to seriously throwing my schedule (and thus my other client’s schedules) totally out of whack.

   It’s really nothing personal, but I want to do something which doesn’t involve working for clients. It’s that simple.

4. I need my fire lighting again. I don’t mind admitting that I’m not afraid to dream. I want to do something exciting. I’m bored with building websites, and the tedious aspects of the process it often entails. I want to work less. I want more time for friends, family, hobbies. I want to be fired up with excitement about something again. I want to simplify, break it all down and dream it all up again. And I intend to.

5. I want to own my creativity. I’m currently paid for being creative (and all that that entails) for somebody else. While this has been great till now, I desperately want to be creative on my own terms. Yes: me, me, me, me. And why not?

   Most designers and developers for hire don’t usually do so, of course, but it strikes me that those who create and make their own stuff (whether that be design, music, painting, writing — whatever) and make a living from it tend to be happier. I certainly feel like I would be anyway, for sure. I want to set my own schedule, take a step further to actually being my own boss, in the truest sense of all that promises.

So what to do?

Once I knew I’d hit the wall, I started casting my net around for ideas. For the last 10 weeks or so I’ve spent around 2 hours every night, simply researching.

At first, there was no form or structure to the research whatsoever. I just brainstormed; tried out different ideas without judging them; read lots and lots and lots of stuff; made copious notes; tore copious amounts of notes up. In the last few weeks the plan has crystallised to the point where I’m now absolutely ready to go over the edge, totally ready to go.

The details are for a future post (this post is long enough already) but I’ll be posting frequently here about what I’ve decided to do and how it’s going. It’s unknown, it’s unproven, with absolutely no guarantee of success whatsoever. I can’t tell you how utterly giddy with excitement I am. I’m 100% happier already.

I won’t be making quite such a drastic all-or-nothing break this time. I’ll still be taking on new client work for the near-to-mid future at least, and will most certainly always look after existing clients. I’m not turning my back on web design completely — in fact my new venture is still web-based anyway. I’ll be running Definition for a good while yet.

For future client projects, however, I’ll be choosing carefully from now on, smaller low-key projects only. And I’ll be protecting my time and attention carefully, maybe around 3 hours per day spent on client work, with the rest of the time dedicated to new things.

I’m busy running down certain aspects of my business that only exist to serve clients: cancelling certain web-based subscription services; cancelling my business landline; cancelling my account with Moneypenny (though that is something I’m sad about losing).

I want to be happier and enjoy a better quality of life. I’ll let you know how I get on :)

I’m ashamed that since this post back in February I haven’t been able to be as involved in Hull Digital as I’d like to have been (despite organiser Jon Moss’s persistent, patient invitations)!

I’m thrilled to bits that since then, Hull Digital has gone from strength to strength (clearly without my influence!)

This beautifully shot and edited video does a great job in highlighting the benefits of Hull Digital, leading up to October’s Hull Digital Live 2009, a proper conference/event that might be common in other cities but is sadly lacking in Hull, till now. Exciting stuff.

Well done Jon, and all the organisers and members of Hull Digital.

Jon: I’ll be there soon, I promise.

Follow the fun over at the Hull Digital website or on Twitter.

Some excellent new features from Google Reader announced.

We’ve made it easier to share posts you like to Blogger, Twitter, Facebook, and more, with our new “Send to” feature.

Very very useful.

It’s been great fun recently helping a friend of mine set up a new niche divorce dating website which has just gone live today.

He originally came to me for advice on creating a totally custom new dating website in a completely different niche (the details of which I can’t go into here, this being a family blog and all). I advised him to initially go with off-the-shelf dating software. Dating is a saturated market and I told him it’d be better to pump all his available resources into marketing and promotion, rather than dropping several grand on custom development that might not be profitable.

After a bit of research we ended up going with WhiteLabelDating and I’m really pleased we did. Set-up was easy, support and advice has been top notch, and the promise of ongoing support is excellent. Working with WLD has felt like working in conjunction with a close business partner, rather than just a software provider.

We’ve gone with the divorced and divorcees dating niche for now. Be interesting to see how it goes.

You can visit divorceelove.co.uk here and follow the exploits of the site on Twitter.

A cursory Google confirms that indeed many other people share my feeling that Andy Roddick and Seann William Scott (Steve Stiffler in American Pie) are uncannily alike.

It mostly hits me at Wimbledon time of year, where I usually can’t believe that TV commentators and punters aren’t choking in amazement at the similarity.

See? See?!

No-one I mention it to can see anything remotely alike in the pair. It’s not just me, is it?

It’s terrible that Campaign Monitor were so badly hacked over the last few days, but their open, transparent response and communication with customers is nothing short of a masterclass in customer care.

I’ve used Campaign Monitor since 2004 and customer service has always been top drawer. Here’s hoping they get the problem sorted soon.

A good friend of mine has just launched a brand new blog called Rock Climbing UK.

No prizes for guessing what the blog’s about – duh.

I’m not much into rock climbing personally — on account of being absolutely terrified of heights — but so far I think he’s done a great job of putting it together. The blog is still in its infancy, but he’ll be writing reports on his own climbs, reviews of climbing books and equipment, and generally sharing his enthuisasm for all things climbing.

If you’re into climbing, or know anyone is, spread the word. Visit Rock Climbing UK.

I’m standing at a crossroads.

Professionally at least, I’m at a clear fork in the road. The circumstances that have led me to this point — the unhappiness and profound professional dissatisfaction of the last year or so — are now firmly behind me (thankfully). Or at least, they will be soon. I’ll get round to writing a blog post with all the details.

More importantly though, I know without doubt which path to take from here. I should do, mind: it’s taken 3 hours research a night, every night for the last 3 months to figure out the way forward, so to say I’m excited about the road ahead is beyond understatement — quite frankly, I’m ecstatic. And yes, I have a whole blog post about that too. I’ll get round to that soon too.

So what’s that got to do with fuzzyness, this blog?

Well, largely due to the aforementioned professional misery, I’d lost the plot a bit with this blog. I feel the need to re-group. It’s hard to clearly explain why, without explaining what’s behind me on this road and what I can see in the distance ahead. But yes, I’ve neglected things round here, and it’s time to apply some love.

For now, it’s enough to say that I just need to write again. Twitter is not enough (though I’d come to feel that it was for a good while). I miss writing properly: the creative satisfaction of crafting a perfectly worded post that both informs, hits the mark and entertains the reader. But also, really, I miss just plain getting it off my chest, and in more than 140 characters.

If future plans run as expected, I’ll be doing lots more writing anyway. It’s all good practice here. More on that later though.

So, things are different round here, with me professionally, with me personally, and with this blog.

In making plans for the future (see above), I’ve been extensively researching blogging and writing tools, and it’s fair to say I’ve completely fallen in love with Wordpress. Fuzzyness now runs on Wordpress. This is quite a big deal for me — I build all my clients’ sites on ExpressionEngine and while I’d never consider Wordpress for hardcore CMS purposes, for writing-focused websites I’m totally and uttterly enamoured.

Wordpress encourages writing (for writing’s sake), in a way that ExpressionEngine does not. The online interface is beautiful, it makes me want to write in itself, but the add-on tools that plug in to Wordpress just make me excited to want to write more and more.

The desktop writing tool MarsEdit warrants a whole series of envangelising blog posts in itself, just a joy to use; Wordpress for iPhone means I can write and post from anywhere; the Wordpress Thesis theme — oh! let me count the ways! Again though, not right now…

So, with changing plans and changing tools, I’ve taken the chance to implement a re-design. I’m down to 1 column. Better typography. Better archives. Simpler, cleaner, a tighter focus on the content.

There are no simple import scripts for transporting a site from EE to Wordpress so I’ve done it the hard way: copy-and-paste, one post at a time. Some posts have fallen by the wayside, as have some comments. Never mind. This site has always been about natural evolution since the beginning anyway.

That’s it for now. I’m positively giddy about the next stage, about the future.

Thanks for reading so far.

It’s hard to keep track at the moment whether swine flu incidence is dramatically rising or significantly falling.

I don’t worry too much either way about these things. I mostly look on media reporting of disease epidemics the same way I do reporting on anything else: spread the panic, keep up the fear.

What is interesting to me though (which I admit I didn’t know until recently) is that apparently all human disease originates from our domestication of animals, from approximately 10,000 years ago onwards.

The reasons for why humans took this path, and the consequences for us of doing so, are detailed in the wonderful What On Earth Happened by Christopher Lloyd. I’d urge anyone to read this book – a highly readable narrative on the history of pretty much everything (a fuller review is for another time).

Further from Wikipedia:

One side effect of domestication has been zoonotic diseases. For example, cattle have given humanity various viral poxes, measles, and tuberculosis; pigs and ducks have given influenza; and horses have given the rhinoviruses. Humans share over sixty diseases with dogs. Many parasites also have their origins in domestic animals. The advent of domestication resulted in denser human populations which provided ripe conditions for pathogens to reproduce, mutate, spread, and eventually find a new host in humans.

Lloyd’s book does a brilliant job of clearly highlighting the cause and effect of human behaviour throughout history. It’s far from sensationalist, but it has made me realise that media reporting on epidemics, global warming and the like are just the tip of the iceberg.

That scares me more than any daily reporting of the swine flu pop charts.

It is evident that we have been exceeding the expectations of copyright owners, the media and internet users. So, we have changed our policy to move in more line with the industry standard approach.

It’s nice to see our local ISP, Karoo, has changed their policy on cutting off alleged file sharers without warning, in keeping with industry norms.

Particularly nice as it happened to me recently, accused of sharing a Harry Potter movie when a) I don’t possess any Harry Potter movies, and b) I haven’t shared any movies.

Obviously, they wouldn’t have done this at all hadn’t the story been highlighted in a national newspaper. Still, mustn’t grumble, seeing as we’re stuck with them.