Survey time! Please take a minute to comment.

This time last year I merged all my blog projects into one codebase, and I moved that codebase to a dev.java.net project. I couldn't be happier: this was a great move. It's backed up, it's easy to check out the workspace on other machines, etc.

Also I automated the process of building/updating the jars: one java app called BlogUpdater combs through the workspace and creates a jar for every java file with a main() method. As more and more projects share small common files this really helped me keep things up-to-date.

Help Me Help You

Now it's that time of year again where I want to step back and look at how I do what I do. What can be improved? Both for me and for you. Any feedback is welcome. Feel free to email me or post it here as a comment.

Specific conversation starters could -- but don't have to -- include:

Currently I list every blog article in a list on the left. Is this a good format? There are over 40 things in this list. By this time next year: there may be 50 or 60? Here is a similar repository that follows a very different format. Also Ken's blog is much less cluttered. Thoughts?

What subjects would you like to hear about? Writing these things up takes time... if I can cater to what you're interested in it will be a win-win for both of us.

In a given project: what do you want to hear about? I don't have a fixed template: so far I've just rambled about whatever I think is interesting. This might be performance, how to render something, architecture, etc.

On a bigger, more abstract scale: does anyone have any suggestions for other ways to focus this time & energy? Maybe I could join forces with other bloggers? (Who did you have in mind?) Or I could work on specific open-source java projects my skill set might lend itself to? etc. If a great suggestion comes up: I might just freeze this blog the way it is and pick up that other project.

Does it bother anyone that I don't have a solid versioning system? (That is: if you use the ColorPicker project, there is no version number associated with it.)

In the articles would you like more code samples? More screenshots? More diagrams?

Does anything about my programming style prevent you from integrating my jars into your own projects? Anything in the java code that you'd like to see changed? Don't be shy!

I recently sketched out a list of big changes I wanted to make to my blog and its presentation; but then I decided it might be much more useful to just ask you, my readers, what you think first...

p.s. if you like things just the way they are, and would like to see more of "the same" articles: please say that too. The only way I'll gauge the majority opinion is if you speak up. :)

Thanks for reading, and thanks for the 9,000+ hits I've received this year. (Give or take a few thousand hits that might just be search engine bots?)