This, the SDI blog, blog is starting to warm up. Just added a call to my new (in progress) blogroll generating script. (See the right-hand column).

And some, er, Google ads down the side.

Why? What's up with that?

Well, I'm a "portfolio worker" (read, under-employed). I have a regular part-time job, teaching programming in the university, which I love doing. And I'm starting to do some contract work too. Nevertheless, this isn't keeping me in the manner to which I'd kind of got accustomed. But I don't really want to give up teaching to go back to full-time programming.

So I decided I'm going "pro". I want to try to get some kind of income from some of my online activity.

Of course, most of my online life is still emphatically non-commercial. But I'm going to do some experiments with a slightly different attitude. This blog will be run on different principles to my other stuff. It will be focussed ... ;-) ... and well written ... ;-) ... and regularly updated ... ;-) ... and intended to capture a larger audience than my personal blog and other online writings.

It's also aiming to be "profitable". Sort of.

I'm starting with a first mission that's relatively low-aspiration : I want to build up the audience and revenue from this blog and SdiDesk related activities to pay my monthly hosting bill. That's about 16 dollars a month. If I get there, I'll have at least found where my bootstraps are, and will promptly set about trying to pull at them.

Over the next few posts I'll start to further develop the themes of this blog and what I'm trying to do. The mantra "Smart Disorganized Individuals" sums up what I'm about. But I'll need to keep elaborating. SdiDesk is part of it, though not the whole thing story.

If you look at my blogroll, you'll see links about the increasingly fashionable area of life-hacking, getting things done, mind-mapping, idea processing etc. It's hard to be as disorganized as me and not to care about this kind of thing. Or not be attracted to the tools. On the other hand, you probably won't find me lusting over brands of paper notebooks. [That attitude must change! If it brings in ad revenue, you'll be writing 500 words on Post-it notes - Ed]

So this blog isn't going to be a "me-too" copy of 43-folders or life-hacker. (For one thing, it will be a damn-sight less Mac obsessed than 43-folders. :-)

You'll also see links to people trying to be Micro ISVs. That's quite a tempting idea too. But it's hard to reconcile with being still fairly dedicated to the ideal of Free Software. I'm not going to start charging for SdiDesk or anything like that. [Careful! - Ed]

No, really, I'm not!!! Although, remember I am (at least later this year) available to do custom modifications.

Even shareware works on a certain guilt-trip that's hard to maintain while explicitly giving people the four freedoms. So, I know you can be a reasonably succesful software company with some sort of free-software commitment. But does it make sense to try to be micro and free? I'm not optimistic. Hell, even smart, experienced developers with popular weblogs are finding it hard to reach their minimal targets in this game.

Maybe this is an experiment in absurdity ... ;-)