Happy Birthday to you,
It’s amazing how you grew.
Happy Birthday,
(It’s a work day),
But Happy Birthday to you!

Two years ago today, Jason’s Random Thoughts was officially born. Though it was originally put together on a simple Synology DS-106j NAS device sitting atop my refrigerator, this blog has been the stepping stone to re-shaping my online identity. In this time, there have been almost 700 posts, 20,000 spam comments, 1,800 real comments and 450,000 visitors (not including scrapers, search engines and every other type of non-human “visitor”).

I never really expected it to survive this long.

Okay … Now What?

Since getting married this past May, I have not really had the opportunity to put a lot of content on here. On top of this, the subjects have been a little stale or written without a proper second reading. While there are several reasons for this, none of them are appropriate for this post. That said; one of my goals for Season Three of j2fi.net is to improve both the quality of the writing, as well as the content. I’ve been working on a new writing style for some other sites and, when I think about the direction I’d like to take on here, it seems only natural to give it a try. What this means for anyone who reads this site regularly is that the writing will become a little more creative, focusing less on ranting and more on providing. This doesn’t mean that I will not complain about things that bother me, however, rather than type out a poorly laid out gripe on a given subject, the article will focus more on looking at first as a narrative and perhaps followed by some type of editorial-style piece. I’ve been practicing this on some other sites, and the results are rather positive.

However, these other sites will continue to remain anonymous, as will the pseudonym that has been slowly building a following. Eventually it will all come to light … but the social experiment is not yet half finished.

Passive Income Streams

There has been some advertising on j2fi.net since the spring of 2007 and, despite the amount of effort I’ve put into earning an income online through various ventured, I’ve managed to collect a grand total of $710 USD. Some of the arrangements I’ve made have yielded nothing more than a goose-egg, while others have offered enough to pay for site upgrades and server additions. That said, after a few email exchanges with Nick Ramsay, I’ve decided to make a more concentrated effort at earning an online income. While j2fi.net will not be the host of this money-making scheme, you can be sure that I’ll promote and talk about it from time to time on here.

Who knows … it might just earn enough money for me to cut back to “part-time” at my day job :P

In any event, I’ll be eliminating a few of the non-paying programs from this site. That should reduce loading times by a good fraction of a second.

Giving Back … Kinda

I’ve mentioned that I regularly guest post on other sites, and it’s something that I enjoy quite a bit. Not only does it offer the chance to write about subjects that might not really fit in with the hodgepodge of articles on this site, but it offers the opportunity to build stronger relationships with people online. To mark the beginning of j2fi’s 3rd Season, I’d like to offer my services as a guest poster on your site. All I ask is that you contact me and let me know what subject you’d like the post to discuss, and approximately how long it should be. Once we get the basics worked out, I’ll try to have something submitted before the end of the week. A link back to this site will not be necessary, so long as my name is left on the article.

On that note … Nick, if you’re still interested in that UTF-8 post, just let me know. Although it was technically resolved with the release of WordPress 2.3, there are many people that started their blogs on previous versions and are now stuck with the less-forgiving database structures.

Alright … on to year three!