I posted a message in the WordPress.org support forums a couple months ago saying that I was temporarily discontinuing support for my Shashin plugin. I was single-parenting for over a month, and getting ready to move to Japan.

Unfortunately, I now need to say that I’m discontinuing development and support of my plugins for the foreseeable future. I’m living in Japan until the end of the year, working full time, studying Japanese, and enjoying the unique experience of being here with my family.

My work over the last couple years has involved an increasing amount of time with Ruby on Rails, and currently involves little WordPress work. Also, I never developed a business model for my plugins, which means I’ve spent many hundreds of hours over the years developing and supporting them for free. That’s not something I can continue doing.

I’ll keep the current versions available at wordpress.org and they are also available on github, if anyone wants to fork them and continue their development.

The WordPress community has been a fantastic place for me. Because of WordPress I’ve improved my technical skills, made friends, advanced my career, and had the privilege of giving 7 WordCamp presentations over the last few years. So this was not an easy decision. I hope that in the future I’ll have opportunities to contribute to the WordPress community again.