Time is running fast. Summer is gone. Six weeks passed since my last post and (despite some folks thought so) I haven’t thrown in the towel yet. While I am back in business still not rolling at full speed. It is not that simple after such a long blogging hiatus but I felt it right to write a quick heads-up post as the first step of getting back on track.

Blogiversary

If that “World’s Worst Blogger” contest would be real, skipping the opportunity to write a one-year blogiversary post would definitely bring me some points. To be honest, besides finding no time to write it, after “taking off” the last six weeks I felt that I have cheated. Maybe I will write it six weeks from now. Sounds legit, right?

Hosting expiry

Almost every blog has a “How to start a blog for $50” section. Most of them contain the same general info and fulfills one and only purpose to share the referral link of the chosen hosting provider (mainly BlueHost as they pay most). Some show a little bit more work and are truly helpful. What is not emphasized is that when your hosting plan expires after the renewal your fees will go up. My choice was SiteGround, love at the first sight, but as I didn’t know if I can keep at blogging for long-term, only paid for one year of hosting. As time got closer to the date I started being reminded of the renewal. While I haven’t had any problems with SiteGround and totally satisfied with their service I just did not want to pay the increased price.

Long story short, after some discussions with the lovely customer service I had my plan in place and that included moving my blog to a new hosting provider. I wasn’t too picky, went for the cheapest possible option (despite I know that it can be a bad idea) which was GoDaddy’s one dollar web hosting. It wasn’t an easy ride, but I managed to figure out things in a couple of days and my blog was up and running at the new place a week before the expiration.

I know that a cheaper price could mean worse service (which is absolutely true in terms of customer service, SiteGround is excellent on this field) still I got one year of hosting for the price of one and a half month. The finishing accord of my master plan will be returning to SiteGround once my account will become renewable (they said after a couple of months). And have no doubt I will choose the longest period available this time on the promo price.

Vacation

Recently I read an article about the US vacation habits and I was shocked. It is not just that they have fewer days of paid annual leave, more than half of the Americans don’t even use them all. Call me lazy if you want but I am pretty happy with our granted 25 days of paid annual leave on top of the generally paid holidays. Oh, and you could bet that I don’t shy away using them all. For a programmer who never works on weekends, this means five weeks away from the dreaded cubicle.

From the last six weeks, I spent three on vacation. The first one back in August included the birthday of my older daughter. We surprised her by not buying a gift but visiting a nearby aqua park. She was totally satisfied, so I think it is a good start of planting the seed of the “experiences over stuff” principle. Then, at the start of September, we spent ten days in Greece as our annual “summer” vacation. Won’t go into details now, a post will come about it.

One of the many small epiphanies I had through this time is that I need some structure to remain productive. I put my kids before anything in my priority list and when you make yourself available to them 24 hours a day they will use every minute of it when they are awake. Most of the times I am moonlighting when I write for this blog but those days I was so tired by the time they fell asleep that I followed them closely.

That’s all for now, but stay tuned, there are some interesting posts coming! Please subscribe if you don’t want to miss them! Oh, and can not finish this post without including this video of course 🙂