This was the first year I’ve ever set seri­ous New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions so I thought I’d recap how the first half of the year has gone. These are always the most insight­ful posts for me, per­son­ally, because it’s always amaz­ing to look back at what has hap­pened in the past six months.

1. Save and Invest

I def­i­nitely could be sav­ing more, but I’ve slowly stocked away and paid down debt mostly in the form of stu­dent loans. I haven’t been approached to sup­port anyone’s side projects, but I have had a few peo­ple give me insider peeks at their beta projects which is even cooler.

Mint has tons of great blog posts to help with sav­ing and invest­ing. They’ve also launched an Answers ser­vice for your per­sonal finance ques­tions just in the last six months. I highly rec­om­mend both as sources to get your finances on track. I also just signed up for Tex­thog this week to bet­ter keep track of my per­sonal expenses. Mint does an OK job of scrap­ing bank state­ments to give me esti­mates, but Tex­thog will give me the man­ual con­trol to track every­thing includ­ing the small pur­chases that add up.

2. Opti­mize Infor­ma­tion Intake

I have unsub­scribed from feeds in Google Reader and become bet­ter at scan­ning and not archiv­ing links marked for later on Read It Later List. I got an iPad about a month ago and it has helped knock off a few more links late at night before bed. I’ve also qui­etly cut back on peo­ple I fol­low on Twit­ter and strangers I call friends on Facebook.

The biggest help in focus­ing infor­ma­tion intake has been unsub­scrib­ing from every email newslet­ter I can. Hotels and air­lines seem to think I can book a trip every day and some­times twice a day. Every time my iPhone vibrates with a new email, I now know it’s some­thing I actu­ally care about.

3. Read More Books

I fin­ished a book cover to cover. I lis­tened to another one twice in audio for­mat. I’m almost done with a third which means I’m a lit­tle behind the book-per-month pace I had laid out for myself. ReWork is still sit­ting bed­side. I’m hon­estly scared to read it after Crush It and Deliv­er­ing Hap­pi­ness. None of them are healthy for my cor­po­rate psyche.

4. Return to the Dark Side

I hate Microsoft. Inter­net Explorer sucks. Out­look sucks. Share­point sucks. I’m still using Win­dows XP every­day at the office, and I’m glad we have to lock our lap­tops to the desk or it would have been thrown across the cubi­cle weekly. The only thing Microsoft I have come to like is Exchange which my iPhone takes full advan­tage of.

My Win­dows Home Server has been just as big of a pain. I’m start­ing to con­sider alter­na­tives since WHS is noth­ing more than stripped down XP. After talk­ing to some Win­dows 7 reps at Tech­Cock­tail Mobile last week and help­ing my grand­par­ents pick out a new Win­dows based com­puter for their office, I have no con­fi­dence in this company.

5. Pro­duce More

I’ve done my best to keep blog posts con­sis­tent but haven’t done much in the way of videos, designs, or code. In my defense, I have been putting more thought into the busi­ness side of projects instead of purely con­sid­er­ing what’s pro­duced. Still, the sec­ond half of 2010 needs to be filled with releases. I hope Forrst can moti­vate me. If you haven’t signed up, you’re miss­ing out.

6. Visu­ally Brand Myself and My Sites

If you’re not read­ing this through RSS, you can tell I haven’t made any sub­stan­tial progress. I got a great book from Smash­ing Mag­a­zine on Word­Press, but it has just been col­lect­ing dust. This is the per­fect time to get every­thing revamped because Face­book released Open Graph, Twit­ter released Any­where, and Digg is start­ing alpha test­ing for their over­haul. Oh, and Word­Press just released 3.0 which is killer.

New New

There have been some new devel­op­ments in my life over the past 6 months. I did briefly get back in shape before los­ing inter­est. All my clothes started to not fit, but that sparked an inter­est in how to dress like an adult.

My room­mate Andy and I suc­cess­fully brewed our own beer! It was bet­ter than expected for our first time– not great, not craft. We have our sec­ond batch started which we hope will be more refined.

I helped Andy design and launch an iPhone app that got some awe­some cov­er­age from RWW and other blogs along with being fea­tured in the App Store. It has def­i­nitely sparked a big inter­est in mobile devel­op­ment. We were actu­ally just men­tioned in Busi­ness Insider yes­ter­day (and we’re already ahead of them ;)

The new job is wear­ing off. The new city is becom­ing famil­iar. The new friends are becom­ing reg­u­lars, and as for new toys, snag­ging both an iPad and an iPhone 4 have made it a good first half of the year. But, there is more work to do. How are your New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions coming?