When Andrew asked me to share, I was honoured.  Andrew accesses very cool people in business and tech, and asks them the deeper questions we all wonder about. Luckily, I was only doing a “how-to” interview, haha.

I hope my contribution of information furthers what Andrew is working to put out there. I can’t recall picking a Mixergy interview to watch and being disappointed. It’s quality stuff.

One skillset that I’ve learnt and and continued to develop over the last 12 years is systemizing and automating things in businesses.  I hope you enjoy it and future posts on systemizing and automating in a business.

http://mixergy.com/jas-panesar-damaag-interview/

It’s interesting looking back at all I wrote in 2010 and with the perspectives I ended up with at the end of 2010.

Here’s where I ended up:  ColdFusion + Mura CMS + FW/1 Plugin Bundle = My web development nirvana.  I haven’t been this happy with developing in years.  It’s like discovering how easy ColdFusion made everything all over again, 12 years later.

How did this happen?

First, my discovery and adoption of Mura CMS to build web applications.  I know, that might sound a little strange on first read.  I’ve developed many web applications with several ColdFusion frameworks over the years.  Last year I got into built a few apps with it.  ColdBox was amazing.  The problem with me?  Most of the projects I worked on didn’t get to use or leverage the amazing features Luis has put into ColdBox.  It was like having the greatest swiss army knife ever, and not having enough uses for all the tools.  If there’s anything I like doing, it’s using features that make life easier. While I work on some very complex apps, any good framework for ColdFusion can handle it all pretty well. ColdBox was really becoming an issue of preference and wanting a new way to enjoy ColdFusion.  I hope to be able to use ColdBox one day.. but for now I think it’ll be on the shelf and I’m very happy to use it for existing projects.

As part of my framework search last year, I came across Mura CMS by Blue River Interactive and Framework One (FW/1) by Sean Corfield.  Individually, both were really impressive.  Mura CMS was what I dreamt Far Cry CMS was a few years ago.  Easy to install, easy to use, easy to extend and customize.  I could just kind of get things done.  It even had a Wordpress quality installer.  Great, I could use this for a few basic websites that came up and enjoy it.

There was one thing missing for me.  It’s always been missing in everything.  I’ve always had a desire to do as much of my web application development, be it for clients, or my own projects in one way, in one technology, framework, etc.  On one hand, I had ColdBox which let me build great apps, and on the other hand Mura CMS let me create great front ends for my clients to manage. Mura CMS has a wonderful plugin architecture, let me build a quick few plugins.. but it required more thought and learning if I wanted to build apps with it.

Oh, existential crisis.  I want both, in one place!

During this great time of pain from being, so close, I reached out to Blue River.  Not surprisingly, the guys heard me out and shared some great insights.  I was was introduced to Grant Shepert by the Mura team, and he ended up being a few blocks away from me and knew oodles about Mura CMS.  Grant has a great blog on Mura CMS, and while some of it is pretty detailed, it has to be some of the most enjoyable ColdFusion reading I’ve done in a while just from what he was uncovering and making possible in Mura.  I asked Grant if he would be so kind to answer a few questions of “how do I best do this”.. when there were a few ways to do a task in Mura and after that, I was sold.

I heard at the time that there was a Framework One “base application plugin” for Mura that you could use to create more complete applications, bundled as a Mura Plugin.  Yeah, I’ve heard that kind of empty hope before.  The key insight that Grant opened my eyes to was how he was building applications inside Mura.  Grant sat with me and my suspicions were confirmed.  Mura has CMS’ down right, and it’s FW/1 integration for plugins has a ton of power, but stays out of the way to let me build applications, thanks to how FW/1 is conveniently designed.  I highly recommend Grant’s base FW/1 plugin to build apps, it’s a bit tweaked from the one in the plugin store.

Since that time, I’ve delved deeper into Mura’s underpinnings and decided I’ll be centering a great deal of my time and life in Mura for my professional and personal projects.  Mura is a wonderful project in it’s own space, like ColdBox, FW/1 and many others.  Mura is open source, has a good team developing it, and a growing community.  The only thing I wish for is a bit more in the way of documented examples, but resources like the forum and Mura Show have been a great help to get direct help while those things develop.  I’m hoping to share my journey as well from the startup perspective of how it helped me bootstrap and launch quicker.

Today I’m standing in 2011 with another 3 new projects starting, all to be developed fully in Mura.  I feel for the first time in a long while that I’ve found the best balance of technology (ColdFusion) with a platform (Mura) and framework (FW/1) that I think I’ll be happily be able to build for a long, long time without needing much more.

This year you’ll see a few plugins put out pertaining to the small SaaS startups I’ll be launching.  Thats right, plural.  I think I can do more than one.  It’s time to show what ColdFusion can get done with a great cms like Mura can get rid with the boilerplate app logic that ends up consuming so much time after the proof of concept is completed of a SaaS startup idea.

Inward, onward, and upward!

We’ve all heard it: The ability to learn and apply how to communicate with skill is priceless, no matter what we do. At the top of most fields we will often find the best communicators.  The jury might be out on other things, but they do know how to share their message.

Being limited to 140 characters per message in Twitter, I’ve had to get very good at expressing my thoughts and ideas simply and clearly for maximum impact.  It doesn’t have to be bold, or brash, just clear. In this way, Twitter has become one pencil sharpener of expressing my thoughts and ideas.  How does it do that?

The long and short of it is this: When working on a project, product, business, or startups, we’re in the boat of having to communicate a lot, clearly and quickly.  Twitter helps us to develop the habit of communicating with less distracting noise, and more punchy signal.

Like the web, we all need to define what Twitter will do for us based on how we use it. For me, Twitter participates in introducing and sharing ideas that better help us define and navigate the world around us.

Twitter promotes quitting the brain dump to communicate. As a developer of projects and products, be it someone’s startup idea, or my own, I have to learn to cut through the tendency to take the easy way out and “write everything” to “cover it all”.  This is known as the brain dump.  Whether an email, on a website, or in your product, brain dumping as a way of communicating only increases complexity. It reduces focus. It makes people work to find the nuggets they are looking for.  (They won’t and they’l leave) Worse, brain dumps to communicate leave more questions than it answers, and a greater sense of confusion than it began with.

More signal, less noise. Less is definitely more. With all projects, products and startups, we often wear an extra hat of copywriters.  Write less, cut in half, and half again, right?  We often know the most about the product, how it works, and the market fit, and being able to find and speak to it with a lot of impact is a huge thing that the lean startup approach has emphasized.   Learning to find the essence and knowing what message to amplify is critically invaluable.

Training ourselves to speak about benefits instead of features. Since we’re focused on building features, we can have a tendency on communicating the features at length, and not always the benefit.  On Twitter, answering “How does this relate to me” is how information travels quickly.  “What it does” doesn’t seem as interesting.  Always developing our skill to communicate benefits is invaluable in all projects and products.

If we examine “How does this relate to me” about the relevancy of Twitter itself, we can notice some interesting things.

First there were opinions about what twitter was about.

“Twitter just IRC on the web.”
“Twitter is the wall chat of BBS (bulletin board systems) in the 1990’s”

There were the opinions where everyone wondered how is this useful to me.

“Twitter makes it hard to interact in so few characters.”
“Twitter seems like a popularity contest.”
“Who cares about typing everything you’re thinking or doing every second of the day.”

From this, a few things have become apparent about Twitter to me.

Twitter shares something with the web of the 1990’s.  It’s anything, and everything, to anyone and everyone. Tweeting about every moment, thought and whatever, is the equivalent of having flashing text on your website in the 90’s.  Cool to some at first, painful for everyone.  When we were new to Twitter, we were feeling things out.  What’s too much? what’s too little?  How do I participate in sharing?  How do I find what’s important to me?

We had Geocities in the 90’s.  Sites weren’t the greatest, but everyone was involved in consuming, expressing and sharing information with each other.  Blinking text lost out on the web, just like sharing your every thought at every second has (hopefully) on Twitter.  Search engines became a relevant way to link strangers with information that they wouldn’t know about.

Twitter has become a live, searchable stream of benefits to me. How we learned and evolved in expressing and sharing information has lead to a huge impact in the last 10 years.  Everything and everyone is becoming more, and more connected, and we’re having to deal with too much information.

Twitter helps us deal with massive information overload. Those who learn to share and communicate in 140 characters become more and more relevant as information overload and bombardment increases every year.  Conveniently, being able to write good copy for your projects or product is also very, very, powerful.

For now, the best signal to noise adjuster is people.  Computer’s can’t exactly put together the information stream we are trying to piece together ourselves as we go. We need to be able to tune things in, or out, as easily as changing an order at a restaurant. So, we pay attention to those who have a clear, consistent stream of knowledge so it can become a part of ours. Rinse, repeat with others to create our own meal from the buffet of information overload.

While it might be foolish to say there won’t be anything like it again, Twitter has, increasingly found it’s way into our lives as a communication format like email, fax, or phone. Consume it in many different ways.  Participate in just as many. Except, Twitter is a community like Facebook at the same time.  That’s unique.  And I’ll keep working to make the most of it.

So, if you made it this far, take the one benefit from the ideas above, or your own, and share how you’ll apply it.

This event is a groundbreaking start for the software startup community in Edmonton.. I’ve had a chance to meet the organizers and it’s definitely folks who eat their own cooking and are pursuing startups of their own.

Working in startups can be isolating at the best of times… This is a fantastic opportunity to meet your peers and see where things are headed with events, and your input.

See you there!

Find out more at StartupEdmonton

Today I came across an article titled: Ten things to do before launching your blog.

It touches on some great points.  Some I knew, others were new and well well explained.  I have shortened the article to the main points below.  Click on the link above to read the entire article!

Study: Seek out the good people and follow them.

Start building buzz: Everyone should know that a blog is coming and they should be excitedly awaiting your arrival.

Secure the appropriate accounts: KnowEm.com , Google Analytics, Technorati, Feedburner.

Get your house in order: Put up a compelling call-to-action is you’re looking to secure emails for a newsletter. Take steps to make it easy for users to share your content, both via email and the social networks.

Content

Create a content strategy: Editorial calendars.

Seed content:

Decide: Ads or No Ads?:

Promotion

Build your promotional team:

Comment on other blogs, message boards and forums:

Respond to comments on your own blog:

One of the key things to keeping any successful web application running is ensuring you can keep one version running live (in production) while developing the next version… all without the two worlds colliding.

Below are some tips that I have found helpful.

1) Seperate URLs www.yoursite.com vs test.yoursite.com. you can also do www.yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com/development, etc.. You could also create a /beta or /staging..

2) Keep seperate databases, one for production, and one for development. Write a script that will copy your live database into a dev database. Keep one database for each type of site you create. (You may want to create a beta or staging database for your tester).. Do your own work in the dev database. If you change the database structure, save the changes as a .sql file that can be loaded and run on the live site database when you turn those changes live.

3) Merge features into your different sites with version control. In addition to using something like Subversion for source code management (which every site should have)., I am currently playing with a subversion setup for web apps that has my stable (trunk), one for staging, and one for development. Development tags + branches get merged into staging, and then staging tags/branches get merged into stable. Version control will let you manage your source code in any way you want. You will have to find a methodology that works for you and use it.

4) Consider build automation. It will publish your site for you automatically. Take a look at http://ant.apache.org/. It can drive a lot of automatically checking out your code and uploading it to each specific site as you might need.

5) Toy of the month: There is a utility called cUrl that you may find valuable. It does a lot from the command line. This might be okay for you to do in case you don’t want to use all or any of Ant. ]]> http://www.panesar.net/2009/03/09/how-do-i-run-one-version-of-a-web-app-while-developing-the-next-version/feed/ 0