We're just about completely moved into the new place. We decided not to renew the lease on our apartment and are renting a house instead. No more huffing and puffing up and down the stairs or walking half a mile to take the trash out. The house is bigger, and we're saving about $200 per month in rent. Granted, the money we spent getting the house ready means that we won't see any savings for about six months, but we're planning to stay here for a few years. We're both sick of moving.
As we get everything in its place at the house, I actually have some time to sit down and work on projects. I have four on the board at the moment, but who knows what that list will look like in six months. First up will be kicking a friend's real estate web site into high gear. We've been talking about it for what, nine months now? We're both pretty busy people, but it's time to get focused and get it done. Hopefully we can both get in gear and make some progress (dude, if you're reading this, please send me the compiled community information file I've asked you for like a dozen times now, thanks!). Some amazing things are planned for this site, so I can't wait until we get to launch so I can announce it to everyone.
Once we're rocking the real estate community, I have a new side business planned. In the spirit of DtDNS, it will be a fully automated platform that small businesses can use. Yeah, that's vague. Since this one is in the early, early planning stages, I don't want to put any real detail out there just yet because I don't want to get married to any ideas this early. In any case, it won't be anything groundbreaking, but it will be useful for enough businesses, and cost me almost nothing to operate, that it should provide a nice little side stream of income to help pay for my flying.
After that, NeatFeeder is still on the board. This is a relatively simple site, essentially an RSS to e-mail forwarding system. There are other features that I'd like to add to that basic premise, but there is no obvious way to monetize the concept, so it hasn't been a high priority. Frankly, I want the service for my own use. My prototype was doing an OK job for a while, but there are a lot of little bugs that need to be worked out (not every RSS feed is created equally, or properly for that matter), but I just haven't had the time to pour into it. So, for the moment I've migrated all of my feeds over to Google Reader. It works ok, but I'd really, really much rather just have new entries show up in my e-mail box. My whole universe pretty much revolves around my e-mail inbox, so that's where I want everything to gravitate to and end up. I really don't like having to remember to go to a dozen different places every day to check on things. The more things that I need to do that I can bring into my e-mail the better. Unfortunately, forwarding entries to e-mail isn't something that Google Reader will do for me. Drats! I suppose that would kill their business model, and why other services, such as rssfwd, have come and gone without figuring out how to pay for the operational overhead. It's still on my list though. Perhaps as a niche paid service for those that really, really want it (like me, heck, I'd pay for it!).
The last one on the list is actually an open source project in ColdFusion. I'm not going to reveal details now except to say that it's something that is available in many other programming languages, but a decent one is not available for ColdFusion. There have been half-assed attempts, and some good efforts, but nothing truly solid. It's time (well, it will be eventually) to put my skills to use and try my hand at filling a gaping hole in the ColdFusion community, and I'm planning to make it free, open source, and available to anyone who wants to use it. Curious? You'll just have to wait and see. :)
Until next time...
0 comments - Posted by Justin Scott at 12:32 AM - Categories: ColdFusion | Business Development