Category — #01 Business a Week Project

Thank you for stopping by! As you can see, this is an exciting page. My goal is to start 52 businesses in the next year! Yes, these will be generally simplistic self-maintaining and hopefully self-evolving websites; but that's just the point! As with most businesses, some will "fail" and most will only make a bit, but some will hit; and that gamble is what wakes some of us up in the morning.

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Okay, just to get the writing back in black, here’s a business I won’t do: We went to a large Christian bookstore the other day, and it was neat. It was exactly like any Deseret Book in Utah, except for one thing: (doubly embedded colons, so pay attention), Mormons don’t use a variety of brands of scripture. I’m not talking a lot of translations, just more than one brand would sometimes be nice. Over the past few years, secondary brands have begun to appear, with illustrations and economies of scale in production, but not en masse yet.  Yet while walking through this store and seeing a variety of Biblical delivery methods–again, not translations, I mean all the Franklin-planner-looking Bibles, all the mp3 Bibles, etc.; I couldn’t help but wonder when someone will produce a Book of Mormon divided into 365 consumable chunks.  Those publishing a Bible which divides the 1189 chapters of the Bible (or 260 NT chapters) by 365 days have proven successful and ubiquitous, and it is inevitable before someone strikes it rich by doing the same with The Book of Mormon.  So, someone who reads this, do it, send me a copy, and good luck.

Speaking of which, let me plug this simple scripture calculator.  Whatever book of scripture you’re reading, you just punch in where you’re at and where you want to be by which date, and it outputs a calendar for you.

What happened to our site the last few weeks? Okay, short answer:

• Jan 11-ish, our dedicated server went down in California. Whilst we had a RAID to mirror everything, apparently it went down too, and that took us a few days to diagnose remotely…
• Jan 17-ish, we signed up for professional hosting, all on 8-core servers. We like our host, everything’s great and fast, but then…
• January 19, apparently someone being hosted was hosting something illegal–hacker stuff, not porn–but knocking the whole company off the grid. Our host basically gets in trouble with his datacenter (the big top secret server farm). He resurrects everything full-speed, except, as we find out, our websites were physically on the same machine as the illegal one, so our 20 websites are taken hostage by the datacenter. I guess it’s a little like when you give a kid a cell phone, and invariably your first month’s bill is $600 and you’re paralyzed until they condescend to waive it.
• January 22ish, the host gives up on the 24/7 support of his datacenter and gives us a new, clean account on another unrelated server at another unrelated datacenter. Dual-processor, but not 8-core, which may or may not be good actually… But no access to our sites until the situation is resolved, which should be momentarily.
• February 4, most of our sites still have static placeholders, having no access to their databases. We don’t blame our host at all–a bigger host could have swooped in with their lawyers and had the thing solved on day one, but that’s contingent on a bigger host doing anything at all, which is less likely. With a small host, I could IM the owner daily and get reports, which is nice… End of day, we have $8 hosting (total, for all 20 sites). I dunno’. But we’re waiting and waiting for our sites. I won’t mention our host’s name, since people will read this negatively. If I knew it, however, I’d mention the datacenter, since they may deserve some retribution.

I need an online to-do list, but one with subtasks that will comprehend enough complexity for my needs.  Maybe something on sourceforge, or even just a google app .  We used to use bugtracker.net at my old company, but that’s in asp.net and I while I’m using IIS I’m still mainly php based (and don’t know enough to switch willy-nilly.)  And I really wish there were a simple answer between whether I need a project management program, a collaboration