I'm not a big goals person. I think it's a good idea to set goals, and they can help you, but I've achieved a lot in my life and to some extent I'm wandering a bit in life. I'm enjoying it, but I haven't set a lot of goals lately.

I did have a few for SQLServerCentral this past year and I had mixed results. I'll list a few here and then I suppose I need to set some for next year.

Goal #1 - 400 posts a month

When I got the MVP award last year, I was honored to be recognized, but I also was surprised since I hadn't done much differently in 2007 than I had in previous years for the community. I'm not sure what the reason I got it was, but it started me thinking about my contributions to the community and I thought that I was lacking in a few areas. One was in managing the forums, something I'd not done a lot of in 2007, so I made a committment to myself to try and post 400 times a month. 

I typically get about 40-50 a month from automated processes, like the editorial and Question of the Day, but I wanted to set a goal to go above and beyond those, essentially trying to do better than 10 a day.

I made it, closing out the year as I write this on Dec 31, with 4818 posts.

Goal #2 - 1,000,000 Members

We started tracking membership from day 1 in this community and as I watched it grow in 2007, I thought we could really do well in 2008. Our growth has been fairly steady, and as I extrapolated out, 1 million would be a stretch, but I tried to do little promotional things, speaking, working in other forums, etc. to try and grow membership. In October I thought we would make it, but the holidays slowed things down and we'll just miss it.

However I'm sure we'll make it next year.

Goal #3 - Speak at all Denver user groups

I am sad to say that I let this one completely get away from my in 2008 and didn't speak at any of them. Two of them asked me and I did do a panel for the Colorado PASS camp, but I didn't even make all the user groups. I need to roll this one to 2009 and get out there more.

Goal #4 - Drive SQLServerCentral Forward

This one wasn't completely me and it wasn't for some lack of trying, but the codebase has evolved quite a bit to use newer .NET constructs like nHibernate and I don't know anything about them. Plus I've been busy with the site and haven't dug in, but I am disappointed that the site hasn't incorporated more changes this year. We lost some deveopers, got more, then had them reassigned, but I'm hoping we'll get some good steady time in 2009 to make some changes to the site.

Goal #5 - Podcast all year

I have to say that I didn't miss any days podcasting. For the year I did 252 podcasts for SQLServerCentral and about 40 for Database Weekly. When I started I wasn't sure how I could keep up, but I've learned a few things and managed to not only write the editorials, but get them on film.

I'm still learning and look for some more changes in 2009.

Overall

I think I had a pretty good year with SQLServerCentral and am looking forward to next year.