The past year was quite an eventful. Not necessarily on this blog, but in my personal life. Before I started my plugin advent calendar, I only had 13 blog posts written, that’s half of what I had as a target for the year. With the additional 24 blog posts, I managed to publish 37 posts in 2025. For this year, it’s probably going to be less.

Focussing on some other things

Back in July, I started to experiment with short videos on my new YouTube channel. This was a nice project, but I had to realize how much time it takes. I want to produce more videos, but that would take away some time from blogging.

The other sweet distraction is my parenthood. Taking care of a child takes away most of your free time. But it also gives you energy and brings new ideas. Even before the birth of our child, I had so many thoughts to share. Now that our family is managing the new life, there are things I would like to share with others, I wish I would have known earlier. Those things will be shared in a new blog. Since we live in Germany and some of those things are more specific to how things work in Germany, I’m not sure if I would translate them to English. But I might give it a try with automatic translations and see, if I get people to read the blog posts. As soon as I have a (sub-)domain for that new blog and my first few posts ready to be published, I will share it with you.

I also still have the plan to create a new theme for this blog, that is based on a full site editing “Block Theme”. There had been a few major changes in the Gutenberg project with the past releases and I might now have most of the things, I would need for my vision of the new theme.

Project #review26

The year 2026 seems to be perfect for another #project26, right? But it is unrealistic, that I would be able to post another 26 blog posts this year. Instead, I want to do something different. As a type of “New Year’s resolution”, I want to do something, I have not done enough in the past, and I always appreciate, if it is done: review WordPress plugins. In the advent calendar, I’ve covered 35 plugins I actively use. Some of them are plugins I contribute to and some are premium only. But for the remaining 28 plugins, I have not left a review for most of them. Since I wrote about them here, why not give back to the plugin creators by leaving a constructive review?

Conclusion

While I might not be able to publish 26 new posts on this blog, I still hope to “produce” 26 pieces of content in 2026, which might be blog posts here, on my new “dad blog” or in the form of short YouTube videos. If you have topics you would like me to cover in a video, maybe some tricks on how to use PhpStorm, which I want to have a focus on in some videos, please share your ideas in a comment here.

And do you have plans for 2026? Maybe some resolutions as well? If not, how about joining me in leaving a review to plugins you use and/or really like? I’m sure the plugin authors would be happy to see them. You don’t have to write them all in one day, you have 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, to write them.