Making Web Products is Tough
Category: Business & Management Tags: My Work, Business
Despite putting the last two years into building products and clientele, I am still living in a cold basement of a house that I don't own. I am not giving up, though. Here, I will document the main struggles I've had in each step of building products on the web.
Planning
Nothing goes as planned. You can have a well thought-out and orchestrated plan, but it won't happen that way unless you are copy-catting other people or have built something really similar in the past. All of the products I am building are breaking new ground, so I can never estimate the time I'm going to need. We all have ideas, but I am convinced that the people who are successful are the ones that are able to build and get their products and ideas out the door. I am constantly working on my process and performance to be stronger and turn ideas into real, tangible products more efficiently.
Technology
You have to choose the framework and language you are going to build on. While building, what if you want to try something new, or different? Well, each change along the way takes more time. The software engineer part of me wants to rebuild everything in fifteen technologies and ways, but the businessman says to never change anything. So, I'm left in a weird position where sometimes I follow the software engineer inside me and improve myself, but then it take a lot longer and am happier with things. Sometimes I plow through it business-style and am unhappy with the underlying technology.
Partners
One of my companies has a board of five people and it gets to be political, where the others don't have any politics to deal with. Politics can be fine sometimes because it is good to discuss and approve things, but I prefer the latter. Keeping the amount of partners minimal is a good idea to make sure the communication and direction is clear and focused.
Resources
You need finances to buy time. Because I run my consulting company to pay the bills, I don't always have free time to build the products I want to build. When I do make enough money to buy my time to build products, I often need help to pay people the rest of my money. I am pretty much always, "broke", even though I make a good amount of money consulting. This has been a far better environment for building products than being a full time employee ever was because I got burnt out, but it still will continue to be a major challenge until one of these products becomes successful.
Moving On
I am continuing to change and become far better at building products, but this journey is proving to be long and arduous.
To be a good employee or consultant (something I'm good at) is a completely different skill than being able to pull product ideas from thin air and turn them into working reality. I tip my hat to Shaun Inman and the others who have been successful at doing this.
2009 in Retrospect
Category: Marc Grabanski's Work Tags: My Work
Since this website is dedicated to documenting my career, I figure I'd better take a look at the last 11 months which have been quite inspiring.
The company I started now has a strong team and we are ready to swing for the fence next year. We have gained 20+ clients, with 30+ projects which all have been delivered on time and on budget. Sick! Way better than I thought.
MarcGrabanski.com
Although my blogging and open source work has slowed down while trying to boost my company, that has not stopped website readership from growing. We are up to 119,065 visitors last month with 62,946 being unique.
Version 3 is Coming, Built From Scratch
I am gearing up to release version 3 of this website, which will hopefully re-surge my energy and motivation to bring you fresh content. It is yet another custom system built entirely from scratch. I dumped ALL my current code and design in order to rethink the whole blogging paradigm from the bottom-up.
More Speaking
I spoke at more events this year. I especially enjoyed the short-notice trip to Dublin, Ireland.
- jQuery Summit 2009
- jQuery Conference 2009 in Boston, MA
- Epicenter 2009 in Dublin, Ireland
- MinneWeb Con 2009 in Minneapolis, MN
- Twin Cities Web Design 2009 in Bloomington, MN
Technical Editor
I technical reviewed Dan Wellman's book on jQuery UI 1.7.
jQuery UI 1.7: The User Interface Library for jQuery
Startup Companies
Aside from my consulting company, I own shares in two startup companies. One of them launched a few months back, it is a rental listing and search engine called Rent Update. Another one is a firefox extension that talks to a web service I built.
Spring of LIfe
I used to be so addicted to things I could not possibly be useful to society. I had a life-changing experience back in 2004 and I'm starting to open up to sharing the source of my motivation and strength. The source that has led me to make this website, share with you any knowledge I have, and provide everything I can for my clients.. Jesus.
"but whoever drinks the water I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life." John 14:4
I feel "life" springing up inside me every day and even the most simple things in life take on extraordinary meaning.
Engaged!
I got engaged to Candy! She's been there beside me for the last three years and we are excited to tie the knot.
Happy Holidays!
jQuery Enlightenment is a Worthy Purchase
Category: JavaScript & jQuery Tags: jQuery, Books
If you haven't heard of or read jQuery Enlightenment, then you probably should go subscribe to more jQuery blogs, this one has been posted everywhere. Simply because this book is an excellent read with excellent examples, worth the $15 purchase. It has live links to code examples you might need down the road.
And no, I wasn't paid to do this post. All the dough goes straight to Cody Lindley on this self-published e-book, and he deserves every penny. Go Cody go! *cheers*
Tips to Secure Your Web Hosting Server
Category: Linux & Server Admin Tags: Security, Linux
A friend of mine, Elliot Swan got hacked - one of his JavaScript files had been modified to contain some sort of advertisement. Here are a few tips you can do to lock your server down, starting with simple things and getting more advanced at the bottom.
- Change your web hosting password.
- Change your SSH / root login username (if possible) and password.
- Change your FTP username (if possible) and password.
- If you changed your FTP username, chown the files to the new user through SSH by typing "chown -R username:usergroup YOUR_WEB_PATH". If you don't know the usergroup, check out the current files by typing, "ls -la YOUR_WEB_PATH"
- Change your permissions to the lowest number to allow your website to still work, this might be 444, 644, 655, 744, or 755. "chmod -R 755 YOUR_WEB_PATH"
- make sure there are no authorized keys found in your "~/.ssh/" folder. Type "ls ~/.ssh", and then "rm authorized_keys" if it is there unless of course you use that for authentication. Authorized keys allows you to ssh without a username and a password, because you put your id on your computer and on the server.
- (tip via friend, Grant Wood) There is a linux service called, "aide" that can email you when files are changed, but that is fairly intense to setup.
- (tip from friend) Check your log files in /var/log to make sure there is no unauthorized connections that you haven't made.
- Update your php.ini file with better PHP settings.
- Upgrade any installed CMS or web-based software.
If all else fails, switch web hosts or hire a server admin, because you are screwed.
RSS Feeds in Facebook, Walled Garden of Fail
Category: Usability & Testing Tags: Facebook
If you hook your RSS feed up with Facebook, the items keep you inside the walled-garden of Facebook fail.
Let me give you an example.. so if I see this RSS item show up in the facebook stream:
I click on the link and it sends me to a Facebook note.
The RSS feed links should go to the intended context, my blog! #facebook #walledgarden #fail
