As another year draws to a close, looking back on the events of the past twelve months gives me a chance to reflect on the things that I have done and the things that have affected, changed me and - in some cases - made me a better person.

The arrival of our son, Noah

Our most important, most treasured, most beautiful gift - Noah - arrived back in August, and changed our lives forever. Friends, relatives and colleagues had all explained to me how this would happen, and whilst I knew that my priorities would be altered for the rest of my life, until I held our perfect little boy in my arms that morning, I truly had no idea.

The last four months - seriously, four months - have been the most rewarding of my life, as Noah learns to smile, laugh, respond and develop his personality. They've also taught me the value of time itself, and I now try to spend as much time with Noah and Bella as I can.

Becoming a Black Belt

As one journey begins, the first part of another comes to an end. I've been training in karate-do for nearly six years and credit most of my recent successes in my career and life to the positive changes that have come about through that training.

On Sunday, December 19th, we escaped the snow and ice of Warwickshire to travel up to Nottingham. After a wait of nearly three quarters of an hour, it became evident that the key holder for the venue had been unable to make the journey, due to adverse weather conditions, and the decision was taken to move the grading to Leicester, where an alternative venue was available.

After three hours of intense examination - of our technique, endurance, kata (form) and kumite (sparring) - I was thrilled and proud to be among the dozens of students who were told that we would be grading, and I received a black belt to go with the black eye I received scant minutes before.

Being able to share the experience with my friends who train alongside me, one of whom achieved the incredible feat of grading to Nidan (second dan), was amazing, but having my family there to support me and share the day was truly wonderful.

Success on the web

Recognition for any achievement, personal or professional, is always welcome, but the process we go through in order to gain those achievements is often more valuable than the achievement itself. At work, my team and I are very proud of the things we build, and when we relaunched the Listers Group website last year, it was the first step on a journey towards making the website more effective for our customers.

Winning the Dealer Group Website of the Year award was a fantastic achievement for my team and validates the approach we take and the direction I've steered our website in since the relaunch. Awards are great, but having the increase in visitors and almost 150% increase in enquiries from the website since we relaunched is almost more important.

Our plans haven't changed either, and we're going to keep pushing forward with a 'responsive refresh' of our existing design - an ongoing, evolving alpha of which will live on my alpha site until we're ready to put it on our beta site - tailored to fit the 'one web' vision, championed by Tim Berners-Lee and people like Jeremy Keith and my pal Paul Robert Lloyd who really understand the principles of having a content-driven, responsive design that works for all devices.

Along with it will come heavy optimisation, more tweaks to our back-end code and databases to ensure things run quicker than ever before and lashings of HTML5 and CSS3, in a refresh of our current design that already focuses on functionality instead of cross-browser pixel-perfection.

In Memoriam

Sadly, 2010 was also a year in which friends and family left us. I had to say a final farewell to a great uncle, a great aunt and other friends who I'd prefer were still here. I take solace in the fact that my friends, family and I are better people having known them, and that I will continue to smile when I recall memories of them - memories to which this post is dedicated.

Looking Forward

I'm hoping to do more next year, pushing the boundaries of what's possible with new technologies, bringing more things together and learning more by attending excellent conferences such as New Adventures in Web Design in January and dConstruct in September. If I only manage to make two events this year, I'm certain those will be the highlights.

Next year will bring its own challenges and triumphs - of that I am more than certain - but given the preparations I've made, the tools at my disposal and the support of friends and family, I'll be heading into 2011 confident of my abilities to meet them head on.

Between now and then, I'll be spending my time with family and friends, so have yourselves a fantastic Christmas and a wonderful new year!

See you in 2011!

If you're on Facebook, you've probably seen this update from some of your friends:

Change your Facebook profile picture to a cartoon character from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same for the NSPCC. Until Monday (December 6th) there should be no human faces on Facebook but an invasion of memories. This is [a] campaign to stop violence against children.

I started seeing this pop up in my news feed from a bunch of my friends on Saturday. Many of my friends started changing their photos without posting the update.

I didn't.

Some of my friends were outraged by my comment. A few realised what I was getting at.

Show your apathy with a Twibbon or Profile Badge today!

People are outraged by many things - child abuse, threats of funding cuts to services, huge losses of jobs, investment banking, politics - but very few people are actually moved to the point where they get off their arses and do something about it.

Some people will even change the entire colour scheme of their websites for a day, or even a month. I would wager that the majority of individuals who make these kinds of changes won't give a second thought to the actual cause, nor will they donate their time, skills or money to anything that might, y'know, actually help.

What did you do? You changed a few pixels of your profile photo.

Well done.

Having spent the first two weeks of June running both sites in tandem, Murdoch finally called time on timesonline.co.uk a couple of weeks ago. The switch was flipped, registrations became mandatory and the great experiment began.

The graph above, from Experian Hitwise, shows what happened in fairly bleak terms. If you average that line out, prior to the launch, you get a daily market share of around 4.5%. Fast forward to June 2nd, when thetimes.co.uk launched, and the migration begins, but the mass exodus in the week commencing June 16th is incredible, suggesting that the website has lost over 50% of its regular daily traffic.

A lot of people - myself included - believed this would happen, but the worrying factor is this: the drop you see in the graph above isn't the result of Murdoch asking people to pay, but the result of forcing people to register.

It'll be interesting to see how much of the 1.8% market share remains now that people are being asked to pay.

On Friday, as he walked off the pitch following a dreadful performance by the England football team, Wayne Rooney - who is paid approximately £90,000 per week by Manchester United - criticised England fans, specifically the ones who booed their players off the pitch after an uneventful 90 minutes of football played against Algeria, live on television:

Granted, the statement was issued in the heat of the moment, and he's since issued an apology - one which was obviously very much 'advised' (you could say forced) - but the simple fact is that it shows the lack of respect these players have for their supporters, fans, and the people who look up to them.

No respect

Over the last two decades the salaries of the players, and ticket prices along with them, have gone through the roof. The respect and humility shown by the players, however, has not. These people who are put on marketing pedestals and who must surely forget that they are role models to tens of thousands of children across the country, cheat, dive, gamble, fight and swear. I'm no angel, but then I'm not a professional sportsman either.

Every sport has it's laws, and those laws are enforced by referees. Referees should command respect, and players should respect the referees, no matter how they feel the interpretation of the enforcement. In most other sports, this is usually how it plays out, but in football, it's not uncommon to see a player run up to a referee, get in his face, and issue expletive-ridden diatribes outlining how they feel about the last call which was given against them.

So, as role models, these people are telling those who worship them that it's okay to act like this on the pitch; it's okay to show no respect to referees or people in positions of authority; it's okay to dive and cheat; it's okay to have no integrity.

It's not okay. I can't imagine many professional rugby players showing a referee the kind of disrespect that seems to go hand in hand with the game of football - not least because they'd spend the next 10 minutes in the sin bin if they did - because they show respect to the referees, sometimes even referring to them as "sir".

Are the referees partly to blame?

I'm sure some of the football referees command respect - I can't imagine many players attempted to show Pierluigi Collina the kind of emotional outbursts that many premiership refs routinely get - but I feel that referees sometimes let things slide because of the potential explosive reactions from fans or other players or, perhaps, out of the fear of making the wrong call.

Referees get it wrong sometimes. They're not omnipresent, all-seeing, infallible beings who know exactly what happens and how, despite what Sepp Blatter, the current head of FIFA, would have you believe. Understandably, players and fans who saw different will react with varying levels of outrage.

Unlike most other sports in the world, however, there is no video replay technology that would allow teams to question borderline calls, or incidents where they had genuine reason to doubt the referee's call. The technology exists, but football refuses to adopt it.

Not really a big fan

I'll come right out and say it - I've never really been a big fan or supporter of football. I was never taken to games as a child, so never really forged a love of the game from an early age like most other people. Generally, I'll show a little more interest than usual when international tournaments crop up - the European Championships or the World Cup - as it's the national side, and it's easy to get caught up in the emotions.

Football as a sport, however, is not one I want to be associated with. It's corrupt, in a dire financial state, and full of players for whom the money and lifestyle is more important than the game itself. My buddy Paul Robert Lloyd has a far more in depth opinion on the state of football, but I'm in full agreement with him.

It'll probably come as no surprise to you, then, that the World Cup I'm more interested in starts next year.