Most “new years resolutions” fall by the wayside – at least, they do for me. The problem is that saying you’ll do something because you’re celebrating an occasion, and not because you want to, are just doomed to fail. Thats why this year I’m labelling them as resolutions for 2010 – and I’m refusing to start them on the 1st January. 🙂

So anyway, I’ve made a list of the things I’m aiming for in 2010 – in the hope that posting them publicly will encourage me to keep with them rather than risk the shame of quitting!

Finish all ongoing web projects

I’ve got his unfortunate knack of having these great ideas for websites/apps, getting them about 80% finished before I forget about it and it disappears into my ever-growing list of eclipse projects. I think I’ve blogged about it before and I’ve certainly moaned about it on Twitter, but in 2010, thats going to change.

First on my list are my commitments to WPSynergy. I’ve been working on polishing off the PigNews theme, a free magazine style theme for WordPress built around my side project, the SynTOF theme option framework, and plan to release the first beta version in the next few days. Then I plan to switch over to version 2 of OneRoom, a theme originally created by Jeremie Tisseau, and then finally onto version 2 of Modmat, a theme crafted by my own fair hands back in February 2008.

Sometime during then I also plan to launch my own blog redesign. I spent a week before christmas mocking it up on Photoshop and I think its looking pretty sweet, so when I get a few evenings free I’ll throw that together.

Then I plan to move all my sites off the Media Temple gridserver onto my Linode VPS. Once I’ve figured out how/where I’m going to keep everything backed up, it should be ready to go.

After that I have a couple of Glastonbury related projects to finish, including an interactive map (more details to follow) and a few others. Mostly stuff I don’t want to announce just yet. 🙂

Get my fitness back

When I was 21 – a mere 7 years ago – I was relatively fit. Over time that degraded through general neglect and smoking until August 2007 when I decided I’d had enough and signed up with Fitness First. After 6 weeks of 5 day-a-week gym sessions, I was already starting to feel better and I’d more than quadrupled the length of time I could run before my lungs gave out (remember kids, smokings bad, mkay?) until disaster – a freak accident and I broke my knee and my left leg was completely out of use for nearly 6 weeks. I worked on getting back to being able to walk normally again, but never pushed myself the extra mile – end result is I haven’t run or even jogged fully for over 2 years and my left knee is a lot weaker than it should be. I was an idiot in that regard, I admit, and 2010 is the year I put that right. I’m paying out of pocket for some more Bupa physio sessions and see what I need to do to achieve that.

Smoking, smoking, smoking

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve “quit smoking”. Its usually successful for a few months and then some event will just trigger it off again. Last time it was the day of Robs Wedding when I went into panic mode before I gave the best mans speech, and another time was the day I broke my knee.

So the problem isn’t quitting, its staying quit. I haven’t worked out how I’m going to achieve this yet – maybe invest in some hypnotherapy or something similar. Maybe check out the Allen Carr easyway clinics. I’ll think more about that another time.

Blog consistently

To be honest, I’ve promised myself every year since I started this blog that I’d post at least once a month, and until 2009 I managed that. My aim for 2010 is to not only post at least once a month, but try and keep it relevant – ie, I want to keep away from writing stuff just for the sheer hell of it. I do enough of that over on Twitter.

So there we have it – my aims for 2010. I’m quietly confident I can manage them, as they’re all things I’ve been promising myself I would do for a while. Whether or not I keep to them or not is anyones guess – I’ll report back in a year. 🙂