I am a very goal driven person and as 2013 comes to a close, I always plan ahead for things that I want to accomplish in the new year. I had several things in mind for 2014 that I wanted to do that I thought would have the potential to make fairly good money and others that were just cool.
I have instead decided that I need to focus on filling ALOT of missing Computer Science knowledge instead of being so much of the entrepreneur that I typically like to be. With that being said, I will be taking Udacity's CS 101 starting in 2014. Hopefully after that course is completed I will continue on with other Udacity courses. Here's a link to the course: CS 101 . The course is done in Python, but I will also be writing it in Ruby on my own as well.
Last year was such a rush and a constant trying to learn as much and as quick as possible as I could that I felt like I was drowning in CS sometimes. This year I plan on really enjoying learning new things, and not caring how long it takes. I'll give updates on how I am liking the Udacity course as it goes on.
Since I've been getting pretty decent traffic on the blog these days(usually over 10,000 unique visitors per month), I decide to put up one ad on the side of the blog just to see how it went and if it would bring in maybe $50 bucks a month or so. The first day running the ad I made $3.40. I then decided that I didn't want 'Viagra' style ads or religious ads on my blog, so I went into Google's ad sense settings and edited which ads were allowed on my blog in the end removing quit a few.
Long story short after tweaking the Adsense settings for the blog, I have been making roughly $0.03 per day, which is why I decided today to remove the ads. I didn't mind an ad as long as I wasn't in my mind being a 'sell out'. Well no more ads, lesson learned. It was a good learning experience looking up how Google sells batches of ads and stuff.
On a different note, every year my wife picks a word for her year. I decided that this year I would do the same so, my word for 2014 is: Positive. I want to be more optimistic and positive in everything that I do and my entire outlook on life. I hope you have a great new year and that you are looking forward to 2014 as much as I am!
Keep coding peeps!
-Josh
