Earlier this year, I mentioned that one of my personal goals was to "get healthy". Last week I went under the knife on the operating table. The procedure I had was a microdiscetomy and foraminotomy which basically means the neurosurgeon enlarged the window near C6/C7 where the nerves for the arm leaves the spine. This all in hopes of reducing the pain and increasing the strength in my left arm.

Translation: While I have a lot of time to kill while recovering the next couple weeks, I'm only able to sit at the computer in half hour increments. That doesn't give me a lot of time to either mess with code or produce good original content. However, a half hour is plenty of time to upgrade my sites to Wordpress 2.1 and Drupal 5.0!

In the next couple weeks you can expect changes in the look and feel for CMS Report. I don't have a Drupal 5.0 theme and it likely will be some time before I settle on one. Hopefully, those of you that are creatures of habit won't mind the fluctuation of changes you're about to see. You can still expect new posts flowing through the same RSS feeds as you've seen this past year. What you likely won't see though is the return of this four column theme. Stay tuned...

For the most part, I usually say "no" to making New Year resolutions and IT predictions. I never really get things 100% completed to say I've resolved those things that I previously promised. I have yet to ever fully predict what is just around the corner for IT (actually it almost usually turns out better than even my most optimistic predictions). However, no matter the time of year, I always have goals that I strive to meet.

The following are some of my open source IT goals for 2007:

• Return of the Geek. Outside my "day job", the past year has been filled with freelance projects designing and hosting sites for various clients. As I wrote a few months ago, the whole experience of working outside of work for cash has led a bad taste to my mouth. When you really don't need the money, why do it? For 2007, I rather spend my time contributing to open source projects such as Drupal. I've been a wall flower for too long and I think the core developers would like to see wall flowers not be wall flowers.
• For sites that I own, I need to do a better job of installing the betas and release candidates. For example, when I started CMS Report it was with Drupal 4.7 Beta 1. I'm sad to report that this site is still using Drupal 4.7. It's very hard to contribute to open source if you're not willing to go on the edge with some of your production sites.