What I'm up to

I haven't been posting much here for a while. All my blogging effort has been going into Living Skillfully: Change Your Life, my personal development blog, and guest posting on other related blogs to build more traffic and subscribers. But it's time for a roundup of what's been going on.

I'm about to bring out another online course, Stop Procrastinating, Start Succeeding (there's a $20 discount offer if you sign up before 22 November 2010).

I also want to put together a small stop-smoking product before the end of the year, since cigarette tax goes up here on New Year's Day and that will stimulate a few more people to look around for effective ways to stop smoking. I'm approaching quitting smoking in terms of a personal development challenge rather than from a strict medical model.

I haven't just been writing about personal development, though. I'm doing some too. I've started getting up earlier to exercise, which is going well (I'm progressing through the Hundred Pushups challenge). Conveniently, this builds the same muscles that I use to paddle my new kayak, which is a lot of fun.

Starting in February, I'm doing a 10-week improv class. My day job may also pay for me to go to a public-speaking course run by Toastmasters.

Very slowly, I'm working on a Young Adult novel called The Y People, which is a bit of a hat-tip to the X-Men while being almost completely unlike it.

I've moved all my creative stuff over to C-Side Media at last, and I'm thinking about starting a new blog there (because I don't have enough blogs). This one will be about the process of self-publishing, basically how you can publish your book for free. It's a topic I have useful knowledge on and it would benefit other people, plus if I get people subscribing to it there'll be some splashover to my other projects. I'll announce it here as and when. (You can subscribe to get all C-Side Media updates on any of the several C-Side Media blogs.)

I'm also planning a podcast in the New Year on personal development, in which I'll interview other personal development bloggers. Steven Aitchison has agreed to be my first guest. It'll probably be monthly.

So there's plenty happening in my life in 2011. Feel free to leave a comment if you'd like to know more about any of it.

JavaScript frustration

Advisory: Whining. Also, technobabble.

I really, really hate developing in JavaScript. And the basic reason is not that the language is butt-ugly (though it is); it's that when you make a mistake, it's so hard to find it because the tools are so primitive.

I'm almost certain I remember that browsers used to give you error messages when you screwed up your JavaScript. They were near-useless ones that said "Syntax error in line 12", but at least, if you could locate what your browser thought was line 12, you had some chance of fixing it.

I'm using the much-lauded Firebug in Firefox. Yes, it's useful, it shows you a lot of what's going on, but if I mistype something in my JavaScript so that I have an unmatched bracket or something, does it tell me where? Does it hell.

Instead, it just silently stops working. I then have to flounder around, more or less randomly commenting bits out, until I figure out where the problem is and fix it.

Right now, something that was working yesterday has stopped working and I can't for the life of me figure out why. I click the button and nothing happens, where yesterday good things happened.

Stupid JavaScript.