I first discovered John Gunning’s ISV blog, SmallISV, back in February. I was interested in his blog then as he is a fellow Aussie ISV. However, at the time, it seemed like he lost interest in posting to his blog, but now I know why: he’s been busily coding his first product, which has launched recently: Bi Documenter.
Congratulations on your first launch, John!
“Are you fed up with that lame old directory manager your hosting company provided you with for you website or blog? If you are already familiar with windows or mac file browsers, why should you have to change the way you work for the web? Try Relay for a change.”
Relay, a directory manager and file uploader, has been released as open source. I haven’t had a look at the code yet, or attempted to install it myself, but the demo looks good. At the very least, it could be a good base to build upon for other projects.
Here’s an old, but interesting post, on writing blog posts when you are picked up by a planet:
How to blog for a planet…
It may be interesting to those who are picked up by our friendly MicroISV planet.
When one, such as myself, is starting a business on the side while keeping a day job it can be hard to define your professional identity. What do I do? Am I my day profession? Or, am I my fledgling, slow-moving, yet-to-make-money side-business?
Which brings me to: How do you introduce yourself?, from the Escape from Cubicle Nation blog:
“If you are in the go-between stage from employee to entrepreneur, you may find yourself frazzled when asked the question “So, what do you do for a living?” at parties, networking events and neighborhood gatherings.”
Hmm… perhaps I need to think of a good “elevator pitch” for myself?
For awhile there, I was posting quite regularly, but then I started getting into initial development work. Actually, I’ve done a lot less coding than I’d have liked but I now have a lot more of my ideas and direction sorted out. For instance, I now know that ThoughtFiler needs to be a desktop product first, and a web service second. I still believe the web service would be unique and innovative enough to succeed, but it needs to go on the back burner while I concentrate on getting a 1.0 desktop version out there.
With all the thinking I have been doing about how to structure the product and the user interfaces required, I am once again excited by it and can see the benefits that it will provide. Heck, I want to start using myself NOW!
Matt Cornell’s article, Where’s the IDE for personal information?, has been quite helpful in finetuning some of my own ideas for ThoughtFiler.
The downside is that I’m no longer sure exactly how to code all this, the upside is that I have now confirmed in which direction I need to go. 
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Workflow…
I’ve also been thinking a lot about workflow at the moment… What types of information do people deal with in their daily lives? How do they keep it for later referral?
How do people use paper? What areas are best handled by PIM software? And what, if anything, is best left to paper? Some things are just better done in physical form (or paper first, then digital).
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It is quite a challenge to find the right balance between advancing my product/company, retaining enough energy to give my day-job my best (after all, it is through that salary everything else is being accomplished), and maintaining a healthy social life so as not to become some kind of hacker hermit!
Ever onward!
“Skypecasts are live, moderated discussions that allow groups of Skype users anywhere in the world to discuss shared interests, from classes to computer support to cultural or political debates. They amount to the conversational equivalent of Web blogs, complementing the written interactions of blogs.”
Read the full article here [via ZDnet] and also this [via the Skype blog].
A few minutes after reading this, I started wondering if this could be something useful for our Micro-ISV community. Kind of like a virtual uISV conference - but no travel expenses! Especially convenient to those of us, like myself, on the other side of the world from the U.S.
I think this could be worth a go. Anyone agree? Feel free to post topic ideas for a first Skypecast in the comments here and I may just see if I can get something going…
…if there’s enough interest I’ll try and pick a convenient time for those interested and announce it here and the relevent forums. Now it’s over to you…
AJAX too much? Try AHAH!
First up, from crackajax.net, we have:
and also this from geekpedia.com:
Things have been quiet on the blogging front here of late, but busy behind the scenes (including the “minor” distraction of a cyclone).
I’ve been doing lots of pen & paper development, sketching out database schemas and UI designs. I’ve now got the initial UI for the ThoughtFiler desktop version worked out and, even though it doesn’t do anything, it’s nice to finally see something on a screen. It feels like I’m finally making some progress.
The web version will probably wait now until next year after the first release of the desktop edition.
A few useful JavaScripts I’ve found recently. I have just used (this week) the first of each pair:
And a couple of popup calendars:
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