Additional Goals for 2009

After writing Tuesday's post on my 2009 goals for poker and for the blog, I remembered two additional goals related to both this blog and to poker, and they're things I definitely wanted to mention here today.

7. In 2009, I will update my blogroll and execute a long-awaited site redesign that will make it far easier for my readers to experience everything I've ever written in a much more user-friendly format. I have been tagging my posts with categories for some time now, and I even went back and tagged many of my posts from my first two years of blogging as well before Blogger had the categories thing working, and I am well aware that it is high time to make those categories more useful than they currently are. I know exactly what I want to do with this endeavor to make the tags more useful in a redesign, but the kicker is just finding the time to actually do it. 2009 -- hopefully early in the year -- will be the year when that finally gets done, and I promise the blog will be a heck of a lot cooler to peruse once that is all done. And as I mentioned, I also need to update my blogroll, adding on a few newer blogs that I've gotten into reading over the past year or so since the last update, and removing a ton of links that either have disappeared over the past year or which I simply don't read anymore due to a lack of substantive content. All of the changes I am talking about with this goal could be made in probably a weekend's worth of time, but like I said I just need to find the time and the energy to get er done. It'll happen this year, that is my promise.

8. My last goal for the new year is also related to Goal #7 and my site redesign to better enable my category tags to work for my readers here. I plan to catalog my posts by the specific hands or types of hands I am discussing in them (i.e., "Playing Pocket Aces", "Playing Ten-Nine", or even "Playing OESDs on the Flop", things like that), and then making each of those its own tag which I will then need to make easily usable by my readers. If what I have in my head actually works the way I think it will, the end result will be a list of categories, easily findable and accessible by my readers, where you will be quickly able to see exactly how I play a certain hand or type of hands via direct links to all of my posts where I discuss such hands. So, for example, if you want to see how I like to play AK, you could just click on the "How I Play AK" link and automatically be taken to a listing of every single post I've ever written that involved me playing AK, in chronological order by post date. Then you can just read through as many examples as you like and get a good flavor for how I roll at the poker tables, much better than I have seen on any other sites out there. This will require a good deal of work to set up, in particular with back-tagging all of my posts prior to now when I am officially committing to this idea, but if I can get it done, once again I am absolutely positive this will significantly improve the user experience for all you guys who actually sit and read the 10,000 words I spew every single weekday here. If you can read it, then I say I can certainly find the time to make your time here far more efficient and help make the blog much more navigable and user-friendly than it has ever been before.

That is it for my 2009 goals, I think. Hopefully I will meet and exceed most or all of them in the coming year.