Normally I would have written a couple of dozen blog posts by this point in the year. The start of the Red Sox season. The birthday. My heartfelt apologies for the lack of posts. Faithful readers know the drill.

But this year has been different. We’re in our new house, living our new life. Writing has not fit in.

The past ten years (and really most of the 29 before them) have been times of transition. Dotcommer to traveler and teacher to mild-mannered grownup. To boyfriend, fiance and husband in scandalously few months. To homeowner. To father. And again. To entrepreneur: author, developer, salesman and janitor. Now to respectable member of a community and startup executive.

I’m not sure where that leaves writing. We joke of the many things I’m planning to do in my infinite free time. Most of them ain’t happening. 39 is not 24, nor 16. Time is limited, and I need to drop some projects to excel at others. More on that soon.

But for now, I’m still alive, all is well, and I promise to blog more regularly from now on.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

I’ve been a poor correspondent. Sadly, that’s unlikely to change at any time in the next couple of months. I have a major new release of Serendeputy in its final stages, and I’m also working a separate super-secret project. Lots to do. Blogging suffers.

But, I should be able to have some pictures up this weekend. I have a feeling that Sadie and Lucy are going to be happy with what Santa is going to bring them.

In the meantime, here are some sites I’ve recently added to the Serendeputy catalog which are really cool. It’s worth checking them out.

Fashion Served: I’ve been building out the fashion tree, and I found this site. It’s a showcase for some of the best fashion photography around.

(And yes, I understand the irony of someone who wears shorts and a t-shirt in his home office all day building out the fashion tree.)

Roger Ebert: Roger Ebert can’t talk anymore, but he sure can write well.

Wend Magazine: I’ve also been building out the green tree — we’ve become much more involved with green this year — and I found this site. All sorts of interesting links, articles and stories.

Clients from Hell: Freelance and design clients say the darndest things.

Special bonus, here are my top 25 Most Popular Sources at the moment: Fail Blog, Sadly No, Balloon Juice, Fashion Served, Techdirt, New York Times, Work it Mom, Consumerist, Roger Ebert, TechCrunch, Business Insider, Boston Globe, Wend Magazine, Steve Blank, Holliston Reporter, The Atlantic, Clients from Hell, ESPN Boston, Tracker Editor’s Blog, SEOMoz, Harvard Business School Publishing, The Baseline Scenario, MLB Trade Rumors, Entertainment Weekly, and Cracked.

Make of that list what you will.

Serendeputy doesn’t lie. That list is pretty much what I’m paying attention to right now…

Ok, I’ll admit it. I have become the world’s worst blogger. I’m heads-down working on Serendeputy right now, and the children keep getting sick, going through major school transitions, etc. Alas. My writing schedule has suffered.

At least I’m still getting sleep. Somewhat. Getting through the first year with a toddler and a newborn is the hardest. The good thing is that we are already more than halfway through it!

I’ll be happy when the election is over, and I can stop paying attention to all the news coming over the transom. That’s the downside of building a personalized news application — it keeps coming at me with stuff of interest. It’s like crack. I don’t have time for crack right now, though.

Lisa Williams, best known for her H2oTown weblog covering Watertown, just won a $220,000 grant from the Knight Foundation for her work on Placeblogger. This is great for Lisa; she’s been doing incredible work around citizen journalism and I’m happy to see her recognized.

Jay Brewer get a nice mention in a Globe article about blogging for dollars. Congratulations, Jay!

The Globe’s Donald Murray passed away last week. I’ve never met him, but his Writing to Deadline had a huge influence on my writing. His insights on framing a story and constructing a lede are timeless.

The web would be a better read if all bloggers read his book and applied his principles.

I hope to publish more regularly starting next week. All sorts of interesting things going on…

I’m almost back to normalcy. Almost.

Don’t bring a pen when you listen to Katie Couric.

Matt Bartel, owner of the popular MNSpeak blog also was issued an invitation by WCCO [to attend the Couric 'Town Hall' event], although the station apparently didn’t recognize the name Bartel (ubiquitous in Twin Cities publishing circles) or his business, until the event was about to start.

“They pulled me out of the auditorium and told me that they’d become aware of the fact that I had a blog,” Bartel said. “They said, ‘We don’t want you to participate,’ ” then offered him a choice: surrender his notebook or leave the event.

“I wasn’t going to give them my notebook; I had business stuff in there.”

A compromise was reached – the ‘CCO staffer confiscated Bartel’s pen instead.

I’m sure Couric had little to do with this, but the staffer’s actions reflect poorly on her.

More here, on the penless scribe’s website.

Friend and fellow ex-Abuzzer Jay Brewer is profiled in the Wall Street Journal, talking about his success in building out the Blogpire.

[S]ix months after he launched singleservecoffee.com, traffic and revenue had both more than quadrupled, Mr. Brewer says. He realized he could make the blogs a full-time job, but he had to make sure the performance in that fourth quarter of 2004 was not a fluke. He set up a forecast for the first quarter of 2005 for the blogs to maintain half the traffic they had in the fourth quarter, with the notion that if the sites met or exceeded his expectations he would quit his job. He began looking for more writers for each blog, while rolling out more at the same time.

By March 2005, Blogpire had outperformed his forecasts, he says, and he quit his job.

Congratulations, Jay!

(Previously: Jay’s week of Internet Fame.)

I had a horrible time with spammers on Movable Type. I hope that my new WordPress installation will avoid those problems. I missed the comments.

Comment away!

Hi everyone –

I’ve gone and redesigned the site and changed over from Movable Type to WordPress. I’m still working out some of the design and porting issues, but it should be pretty much all set. If you have any questions or thoughts, please drop me a line.

I still have a ton of work to do to port all the legacy parts of the site to the new look, but I’ll work on that piecemeal over the next few weeks.

Thanks,
Jason

I find myself with many more interesting links than I can write meaningful blurbs.

So, I will start putting up minimally annotated links each day, and save the longer write-ups for my own writing or for other items on the web which really strike a nerve. I think that this, combined with the built-in Movable Type search engine, will allow to build a better trail of where I’ve been, or as Rich calls it: breadcrumbs of my mind.

Didn’t notice this before: Globe columnist Hiawatha Bray has a weblog.

As I threatened a couple weeks ago, I’ve cut over the site from Blogger to Movable Type. I think I got everything squared away, but if you run across any wonkiness, please drop me a line…