This is not exactly a New Year’s resolution, but it’s not far from it. I don’t read enough these days; rather than sit down at the computer when I get bored, I’m trying to get in the habit of picking up whatever book I’m working on. I’ve also got to shed the habit of abandoning books, about 100 pages in, because a more interesting book shows up. I blame ADD, but the fish oil pills are certainly helping. (More on that later.)

Anyways, rather than take a page from JP (who recaps what he’s read), here is a list of what I hope to read before the end of January.

• A Clash of Kings by George R. R. Martin
• The Best American Nonrequired Reading (2006), ed. Dave Eggers
• Black Earth: A Journey Through Russia After The Fall by Andrew Meier
• Next by Michael Crichton

Here’s what I’ve managed to read in the last four or five months. Clearly, I’ve got to pick up the pace to get through my January list.

• A Game of Thrones by George R. R. Martin
• Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
• The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
• Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson

Man, is it good to be done with this. I’ve got a new design for the site, and it’s already getting mixed reviews (who cares, I like it). I’ve also given up on writing my own content management system and embraced the five-minute installation that comes with WordPress. That means five minutes of installation and five weeks of migration; I’m a perfectionist, and it means it took forever to get the site design right. But the biggest change, for me, is that a lot of the content on this site is not managed by this site.

These days, our digital personae are the aggregate of events that happen on the sites we use. I am what I write, but I am also what I digg, what I tag, and even what my friends tag. So I’ve tried to simplify the site by pulling others into the mix. I use Flickr to manage my photos, so I don’t have to build my own photo albums. I use Delicious to manage my bookmarks, and I use SimplePie to list them on the sidebar. I don’t have a resume page anymore, but you can see my LinkedIn profile. I even tried building something like a lifestream, before I realized someone else had done it already. (Then I lost interest.)

The biggest problem I had with the old site was that I couldn’t keep it all up-to-date. So with most of the “extras” delegated out to third-party sites, I’m hoping it won’t take so much effort to keep the content from growing stale. And with a new system that makes remote editing a lot easier, I’m hoping to find more time for actually writing.