Failure # 1

Well, it’s been a while since my last post… My deadline has come and gone, and well… I didn’t make it.

I am about 75% coded and I’ve hit a brick wall. I’m absolutely exhausted.

I have some issues with my business model – so being a techie, this is quite frustrating. I can’t code my way around this one…

The upside is that I’ve been sleeping a lot more and have been a lot more fun around my wife and baby (well he’s actually a toddler now, how fast can he grow?).

And I was really bitter about failing at first, but then I look back to all the success books that I’ve read and well, I’m told that’s pretty much par for the course. Success will come, but only if you keep on trying.

And that is exactly what I will do. I’ll take stock of where I’m at, take a bit more of a rest and tackle it again in another few weeks. Hey, I’m young… the internet is not going anywhere. I’ll be back shortly…

I’m tired of development

Did I say I was coding?

Oh yes, I did. Well that’s all I’m doing with my spare time… It’s really beginning to hurt and I’m not there yet.

I’m at the integration phase with Jyte, RapLeaf and Opinity

This is proving quite difficult, as I tend to code a lot on the train to and from work. With no net access, not much can get done. I’m also getting into PayPal integration aswell. This is a complex model and integration is not as easy as they say it is.

 Take one look at the PDN developer forums for PayPal, and you’ll come to realise that it’s a pretty nebulous piece of work…

2 Months to go

In my first blog post – I proclaimed to the world that I would be releasing my MicroISV business website at the end of March 2007.

Well it’s the end of January now – 2 months to go! And I have been busy. Many late nights, coding coding coding. I *think* I am going to make it… ???

More on Reputation

Well I’ve been exploring the online reputation scene a little more lately – RapLeaf and Jyte are two that definitely stand out.

From what I can see, RapLeaf is an independant point scoring system very similar EBay. Now this is all very old news I’m sure – RapLeaf has been around for a little while now, and plenty of people have blogged about it in the past. But the important thing for me is that this company will also play a very important part in the mechanics of my site.

Jyte is not so much a reputation site, but more related to claims and credibility. Rather than a bunch of my friends rating me as a person, friends and total strangers vote on a claim that I make. Very different slant.

I can now claim that “I am a good person” – and have 23 different people vouch for that. In this form, I can potentially publish this claim – similar to what my identity alone does on RapLeaf.

Of course, I can also claim that “I like to eat bananas”, and 12 people agree and 3 people disagree. Not sure what I would want to do with that – but this is not the point. The point is in the flexibility of the Jyte model. It’s all in the wording of the claim…

I’m very interested to see how Jyte handles growth. At the moment, there are only a couple of hundred claims out there. Yes, they have search, and there are some nifty filtering mechanisms you can you use to find claims that are interesting to you (e.g. via groups) – however I think the real power of this site would be to make a claim exportable or publishable. (JanRain, are you listenting

I make a claim – my social circle votes – I publish. My claim now goes with me. It goes on my website, it gets attached to my emails.

And it goes with me, because it’s all based on OpenID!

OpenID Enabled

Well I’m pleased to say that my development site now accepts OpenID logins.

In fact, I’ve decided that my site will ONLY support OpenID. Frankly, I just don’t see the point in having my (future) customers having to login with an ID specific to my site.

I want them to bring their OpenID with them. And if they don’t have one, then they’re going to have to get one!

Anyway, I’m still got some thinking to do on the security front. I mean, it’s all well and good to accept an OpenID login so that someone can add a comment to your blog… But to let someone into your site and transfer $$$ (read: money) – well, I’m not yet sure of the implications – how can I ensure the level of authentication is good enough.

I know that MyOpenID and Verisign have username/password + CAPTCHA checking. But if someone rolls their own Identity Server with authentication that is too simple, then the user is exposed…

Anyway, much more research to do. Have to get into the OpenID spec. Plus there are lots of OpenID discussions going on these days.

Identity management is really starting to take off… Take a look at Scott Kveton’s blog - CEO of JanRain (owners of MyOpenID), and you can feel the excitement in every word he writes.

Finally, a very big thankyou to Andrew Arnott for his work on a more friendly OpenID ASP.Net login control. It’s a great piece of work, breaks down all the barriers… so all of you .NETers out there, no excuse not to start integrating OpenID support in your site.

Bricks and Mortar

I’m scared…

I just purchased an investment property up in Tascott, NSW. It’s a suburb 10 minutes south of Gosford (about 1 hr north of Sydney for all you non-Australians).

It’s a great little pole house, sitting on a highly sloped slice of land looking out over a valley. From the far end of the rear deck it has (albeit distant) – water views!

It’s been hard work. Lot’s of late sleepless nights.

Why am I talking about this? Because I’m proud and excited about living a much better life up on the central coast with my gorgeous family.

More coding

Well I’ve coded myself silly last night. Managed to complete 6 new stored procs (SQL 2005), DAL, BLL and ASP.NET page with bound FormView.

Silly really. I am coding like crazy – and I’m not sure where I’m really headed.

I might continue what I was doing before – do page layouts, navigation, and text – save the coding for last.

I tend to find that by the time you author the code – your ideas have changed. And ideas can be far better expressed by flicking around some static HTML that you’ve built up. It kind of gives you an impression of what the site looks like, how it works, etc. Sometimes whole reams of code and controls gets thrown out the window – simply because it ends up all to complex and difficult to follow…

 5 minutes of prototyping some text in a few HTML pages can save a hell of a lot of pain…

Opinity – Identity and Reputation

I’ve found a very cool site called Opinity. This site is going to be absolutely critical to the success of my application.

In fact, Identity 2.0 (for now, read about this on wikipedia) is something that I am absolutely passionate about.

Users that are able to bring their reputation with them is something that has never been achieved before.

Check this site out and start building a profile. It will pay for itself many times over as Identity 2.0 becomes embraced…

Two paths

I have two web applications on the boil. Not sure if this is a good idea.

I’m currently struggling to determine which one is going to be the most viable – and this is pretty well near impossible. Who can tell whether something is going to be popular?

Indeed, the answer is probably both. I can see potential success in both applications, so the question is, which one do I do first?

One of my ideas seems to be unique at the moment – I haven’t seen any example on the web yet – so this is a good thing. I just noticed over Christmas that my other idea, which I was certain was unique – is now being done by two other companies. One in the UK, the other in the US. I was crushed when I found this out – first to market is something I hold to be very important. However, now that I’ve thought about it some more, I can still spin things around a bit to appeal to a completely different audience, so there is still money to be made…

Oh, and my ideas?

Well, I will divulge, but not just yet. I want to be a lot closer to release before I let too much out of the bag. But then again, I might let the secrets out early – I’m not always good at keeping secrets. I recall reading a blog about a year ago (sorry, don’t have the link). The upshot was, that it doesn’t matter if you keep things to yourself - it’s not the idea that makes the money. It’s doing something about it and releasing it to market.

1 million people that knows your idea before it is fully realised is a lot better than no one knowing your idea and never doing anything about it…

The commitment

This is my first blog post.

I have resisted doing anything like this, because well, I have always thought that blogs were a bit lame… Sorry, don’t mean to offend anyone, but I’m doing this now for my own therapy.

Not that I expect the entire world to be hanging on my every word…

This blog is all about keeping myself accountable. Accountable to the fact that I want to be a successful MicroISV – and I just keep procrastinating.

From here on, I intend to continue writing about my ideas and developments in an attempt to stay on target… So world (if you’re listening) let it be known that I WILL have my killer web application up on the web (and making money!) by end of March 2007.

So there. That’s it. I’ve said it. My deadline is set. More later…