Kickass Pixels |
building success pixel by pixel |
Every developer knows about VMWare and other virtualization platforms. Most of us are deploying into "the cloud" one way or another. As a developer, virtualizing my development environment has become invaluable Sure, I could run rails, ruby, mysql and other tools on Mac OS X natively. But I would miss out on the great productivity boost.
When Project March was dreamed up last winter, it twisted all my experience with Mailtank.com and other services I built into a new beast. As initial coding began and the vision took shape, I realized it was going to be a nice departure and offer some added value over other solutions. But... It was not as radical as I had hoped. So... I focused on the work at hand for a couples week. Updating Mailtank.com, helping design an incredible new service for a company in San Jose and giving myself time to forget the preconceptions that were Project March. Last night, while walking around Berkeley, eating an amazing donut, a spark hit me. The elusive Ah Ha moment! Project March is on the move again, definitely better and best of all, it is a much lighter and cleaner design, with few adoption barriers. Going to try to build a working prototype tonight. Going to have it in production by next week for my own use. Rock star time!
What can one man build in 60 days? I am about to find out! I am building March, the first service from my new home in California.
Its based on my experience working with past clients and building services like Mailtank.
The goal is to build a service for the Fortune 5 million market, as the guys at 37signals refer to it.
My experience is in workflows and pragmatically applying technology to real business issues.
So, March is about tying together concepts I learned from Mailtank, with service APIs to create a virtual dashboard for small businesses.
Handle incoming customer communication, oversee projects, track the sales process and promote your business.
Its a big vision and not all of it will make it into the launch version. The core functionality will go live and through rapid iteration I will push more features through the summer.
I think of this as a Micro-SaSS business. There is a hard limit at launch on how big I want it to be, both physically and financially.
Development efforts have been planned, deployed costs calculated and performance goals for the customers signing up are being mapped out.
I want to put real customer service into the service part of software as a service.
Of course, I want to see my vision come into reality and help as many people as it can.
Anyway, time to code now!
BlastFu now collects the permalinks from the blog posts, creates a TinyURL and passes it to Twitter!
I did a couple posts through BlastFu yesterday. Quickly I realized that blasts for both blogs and twitter need to be tied together.
This afternoon I added support for TinyURL and fixed the service delivery to post to blogs first and then twitter.
Of course, if you have more than one blog, only the last blog post URL will be saved and passed to twitter.
Next up, passing tags to blogs! Formatting already works!
This post should be a full post on the blog and include the blog URL in twitter!
Today I will be working on the functional UI for March. Hoping to have the core usable in 2-5 days.
March is the code name for a forthcoming product from me. I am focusing on launching a beta in March or April.
This weekend I will post more details about the focus, goals and challenges I am tackling with March.
I finally deployed BlastFu for use in production!
Its in closed testing for a couple of weeks until the final features are added and the any inital bugs are worked out.
I will be adding a beta account request page very soon.
This is from BlastFu and should be on the blog also at http://blog.kickasspixels.com
Blastfu is working in development! It allows you to compose and schedule posts to blogs and twitter. Hoping to depoy a beta this weekend!
