It's Time to Move On: The End of Weekly Posts

This is hard for me to say because I know that there are a lot of people out there who have come to expect and enjoy the weekly posts on this site, but I have to leave the weekly post behind. Don’t worry, I’ll still post, but not very often.

The Reasons

There are a few reasons for what I’m doing:

• I need more time with my family. Everybody says that you need to sacrifice to succeed, and they’re right. The question is, would I rather be known to my own children and wife as a great father and husband who spent a lot of quality time with them, or would I rather be known to a large population as a great JavaScript developer? As wonderful as the second option sounds, I believe God would rather have me be a great family man, so I’m sacrificing some of the time I spend on this site to give to them.
• Return on investment. I’ve seen a great amount of growth on this site over the past year and I’m very happy about it. But with that huge growth in visitors, I’ve also had to invest more time toward the readers and the return on that investment has not kept up with the investment. I’m very grateful for all that I have gotten out of this, but it’s still not worth the time and energy to try to keep up weekly posts.
• Quality. I’ve realized that very few of my articles have been “great” and this is mostly because I’m rushing to get an article written. If I don’t stress myself with weekly deadlines, I’ll be able to take the time to write good quality posts. Also, this affords me more time to write posts for other blogs, such as Smashing Magazine, which gets me a much better return on investment and spreads the knowledge to a much wider audience.

Other Things on the Chopping Block

Other things are being gotten rid of to give myself more time, too:

• My Newsletter is being completely shut down. It costs $10 a month and I’m lucky if it contributes to $1 a month of earnings. I’m so sorry to those who recently signed up and to those who have come to love the newsletter (though I doubt there are too many of the latter people).
• Social network promotions are being cut dramatically. I’ve been posting 1-3 links up on my social media accounts every day to gain more traffic and to entice people to follow the social media accounts. Well, now I’ll only post something when I find a real gem that I want to share or when I write a new post. I’m sure my followers will drop, but such is life.
• I will be promoting my own articles far less. I’ve normally promoted them numerous times on social media accounts and to a large number of sites. I will now only promote each post once on my social media accounts and will cut out most, if not all, of the other avenues of promotion.

All of this may not seem like much, but it’ll at the very least cut down my expenses by $10/month and free up 10 or more hours per week. That’s 10 hours more per week that I have to spend with my wife and children, amounting to 520 hours per year, which is 9360 hours in the 18 years they will likely live with me. That’s over a year’s worth of time that I’ve gained to spend with my family over the 18 years any one child will be with me.

In the End

I pray that no one has hard feelings or is thinking that I’m abandoning them. I really hope you all understand how much this means to me and that you will be encouraged by my actions rather than discouraged. And maybe I’ve helped someone else consider doing more for their own family.

Thank you all, God bless, and happy coding.