Two months into the year. That's 1/6 of the time I have allotted myself for throwing out the old career and bringing in the new. Time to take stock again.

I continue to get more comfortable working in Rails, and have put up several sites using this framework, though nothing too spectacular and all works in progress (links over in the sidebar). But given that the best way to learn a new language is to write code, and I'm writing code every night, I'm happy with that. I'm also doing lots of reading. I'm sure there are plenty more "aha!" moments ahead of me, and I would hardly claim to be fluent in Rails yet, but the pieces are fitting together for me, and with books at my side I can usually make it do what I want with some research time.

I need to somehow find more reading time; there are several books that I want to finish (including Programming Ruby and Mac OS X: The Missing Manual that I just haven't had time for. Part of the problem is that these books are too darned big to read in the bath.

This blog has doubled in pageviews over the last month (which is good) despite the continued problem with doubles in the feed (which is bad). The latter, I think, is down to me making the domain available both with and without www, but I've not yet figured out how to solve the problem, even though I've made several abortive attempts to do so with both the Mephisto code and with Apache. I've noticed the same problem with some other Mephisto blogs in my own feed list. I haven't given up yet. Anyhow, I'll be happy if readership keeps going up at this rate; hopefully other people are finding the linky-posts useful.

As I've mentioned before, I'm going to RailsConf in May. My interim goal at this point is to feel confident enough of my Rails code by then that I can actually sniff around for some project involvement without feeling like an utter imposter.