Tuesday, November 09, 2010

Attacking in a different direction

I've always thought that Medys / Mediblog could be a huge "distruptive" factor in the social/health spheres but one barrier to success is the scale of the task ahead of us when compared to the time we have available to do it. Even if we have the whole site functionally complete there will be a long lead time to build up the user base and for the world to understand it. So whilst struggling with that disincentive, and after watching The Social Network, about the people & events around the creation of Facebook I remembered another idea that was kicking around last year. After more thought, and chats with Steve in a memorably dangerous-looking pub in Erdington, we're adopting a new strategy - creating a different kind of site altogether but one which seems more likely to attract some active users. I can't see this one changing the world but its more likely to get of the ground. In the process we'll learn more about the toolset we're using and how to deal with active users on the site, etc and will apply lessons to Medys as we go along.

So: the server farm (shelf in my garage) is ready, BT installing the phone lines today, ordering Business Broadband as soon as the phone line is active today and within a couple of weeks "Hello world" should be readily available from our joint Dev & Production system and the content should be ready for first set of pilot users by March 2011 and full "beta" launch in July. Can't say much about the new concept but will of course add the link here when there's something to see.

And it's still Liferay, Glassfish, MySQL, Ubuntu, MyEclipseIDE... with the new addition of the Liferay IDE.

Plus Ca Change

Well its more than 12 months since the last posting here which sort of illustrates the glacial pace of events. Essentially not a great deal has happened but despite that it has been necessary for me to tidy up the garage like an expectant father decorating a bedroom, only the new baby is a new server and it will be here in a couple of weeks. Just after BT and get the connections and fixed IP addresses sorted out. Some business stuff and re-organisation has happened too, now after a convoluted process its just me and Steve and a brand new bank account. Apparently the server makes quite a lot of noise, though it doesn't often need its nappy changing - which is good to know.

We are still administering the server with Rimu for the EuroHistioNet project (see http://www.histio.eu ) as that site is a testing ground for the social network side of the project (we can't afford the full stuff with our CMS provider).