Pixiq

Hello, and welcome to Pixiq! I know a lot of you are going to be hellaconfused about what has happened, but that's OK - that's what this post is all about.

Basically, over the past year, as Photocritic has been becoming more and more popular, I have been spending more of my time in making sure that the Photocritic server doesn't keel over and die a miserable, flame-filled death. Don't get me wrong, I love tinkering with technology and fiddling with servers - but I like it better when it is a hobby. These days, if the Photocritic servers went down, it was a huge problem.

In parallel with the server and bandwidth challenges, I have been running my own business for the past year. I know you wouldn't believe it considering some of the drivel I write on my blog some times, but there's actually quite a few companies who are quite happy to pay me for sitting around, writing about stuff. In fact, that's what I've been doing full-time for the past 18 months, under the guise of Kamps Consulting (I've even got a pretty new website and everything).

Anyway, long story short: Pixiq came along and made me an offer I couldn't refuse. In addition to taking over all the hassle of running my own servers, they offered me a fistful of cash every month to basically just keep doing what I'm doing: Blogging about photography whenever I feel like it, with full freedom to write about whatever the hell I want, use whatever obscene language I felt like, and so on and so forth.

So what does this change mean?

To you, my dear reader, not really all that much. All your old bookmarks will still work, all the articles you know and love (and a lot of the ones you haven't discovered quite yet) are still available, your old RSS feeds should continue to work (although they may look slightly different).

You can subscribe to Pixiq's feed if you want, or you can continue to subscribe just to my feed, if that's more your thing. In parallel with Photocritic on Pixiq, I'll continue to tweet on @Photocritic, and my Photographers on Twitter tool has moved, but still works perfectly fine.

I'll also keep working on my other blog project Small Aperture - whereas the stuff I'm posting here is for features (i.e stuff that should still be relevant 3 and 5 years from now), Small Aperture is at the cutting edge of photography news. I've also got some very exciting news about Small Aperture coming up in the not-too-distant future, but I'll let you know about all of that separately.

Thanks for letting us know. What else are you up to?

Well, it's exciting times in Haje-world. In less than 10 days, I'm going to board a plane to San Francisco with my delectable (much) better half, and I won't be back in London until May. In the meantime, our itinerary says something like "USA, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, India", but it's one of those types of itineraries that are written on the back of a cheap cocktail napkin with water-soluble ink, and left out in a monsoon rain for a week or so.

Our plans are as fluid as that; so where we'll really end up, nobody knows. But you can know, if you want to - I've set up a travel blog so you can cyberstalk me to your heart's content if you like.

In addition to the travel, I'll be working whilst travelling the world. I'm working on two different book projects (neither of which I can say much about), my next book (which you can pre-order from Amazon UK but, bizarrely, not from Amazon.com yet) is out around May 2011, and I have a lot of other irons in the fire as well.

So, it looks as if 2010 was a hell of a year, and as if 2011 is going to be even betterer and more exciting. Strap yourself in, and join me for the ride!

Do you enjoy a smattering of random photography links? Well, squire, I welcome thee to join me on Twitter - Follow @Photocritic

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