SiteSprint has been great for me for a simple reason, its helped motivate me and give me specific goals for things I'd be planning for months. It's a problem I and various other people I know have had with development, when the project has no real deadlines, costings or even customers getting around to do it is actually pretty difficult. All the other projects that you need to work on seem to take over.

SiteSprint hasn't given me a budget or a customer but it has given me a deadlines to work towards. So far I have done a few things that I'm happy with.

Re-developed the CSS and HTML

For the first time I used a CSS framework, blueprint css to be precise. Now, if you've known me over the years this may surprise you as I'm sure I've scoffed at even the idea of a CSS framework before. However, I've got to say its fantastic. The original CSS was over 7x larger than my new CSS and most things just worked in all the browsers I need to support.

Migrated from Wordpress to Django

This was a pleasing and satisfying move. I actually think wordpress is great and the right solution for most people but not for me. Being a geek and a web developer I want to be able to muck around and play with the code - add features and so on when I want. I absolutely hate the way you write plugins and extensions for wordpress - I've worked on enough projects that based CMS systems on-top of wordpress to make sure of that. Also, I have my gripes with PHP in general too.

Wordpress also has lots of features I don't need - I don't want a rich text editor - working with markdown or reStructuredText is a much better solution for me.