Solo Web Startup

1

14 Feb 2012

It's not too late to attend this ColdFusion conference
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OpenCF Summit is so inexpensive, it doesn't seem fair. Here's the pricing, hotel and transportation details.

The list of CFML speakers includes Gert Franz (Railo), Peter J. Farrel (Mach-II), Alan Williamson (OpenBD), Matt Woodward, and many more...

It's not too big, so you won't miss one session because you chose a different one. Here's the 3-day schedule. I'm especially looking forward to the Railo training, Unconference, hanging with all the cool kidz, and learning what it means exactly to partake in cf_merriment.

I went last year, and had a blast! See you there...?
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0

9 May 2011

Wish the #ColdFusion Twitter search was spam-free?
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Me too!

So, I added the functionality for you. And you can help me test it.

But first, you may ask, "What's the problem with Twitter Search?". Easy: spam!

Let's take this twitter search as an example: coldfusion OR railo OR CFML OR OpenBD

I put it in HootSuite, and here's what I get:

As you can see, many tweets are spam, but there are also quite a few good ones in there. Sure, you can do some negative filters with the built-in Twitter search, but you only have a total of 140 characters for your positive and negative filters combined. That ain't gonna work.

Refynr gives you up to 20 negative filters! With Refynr Filters, you can enter your Twitter Search string (all positive if you want), and let Refynr help with the negative (Exclusion filters). The Refynr filters also can filter out usernames (no @ sign needed) and #hashtags. Here's my sample Refynr Filter List for the CFML search:

And here's what the results look like in the Refynr web app interface. Remember, there's a mobile version, too (via jQuery Mobile):

A special thanks to Matt Gifford for adding Twitter Search API capabilities to MonkehTweet (http://monkehtweet.riaforge.org/), which a great, easy-to-use CFC library for Twitter API interaction. I love it!

Want to test it?
1. You'll need Refynr account. Sign up here: https://refynr.com/secure/signup.cfm. And connect to Twitter, and create a new Filter List with the Exclusions you want.
2. Log in here: https://refynr.com/secure/login.cfm
3. Use this URL to test with: http://refynr.com/secure/account/TwitterSearch.cfm?qTwitter=coldfusion%20OR%2...
4. Note that, for now, the Filter List that you have connected to your Twitter account is the only one that affects your Twitter search on the above URL
Next up?
- I need to figure out how to best integrate it into the Refynr UI. Thoughts?
- I will make it so that you can have a Filter List applied separately from your Home Timeline, and another for your Twitter Search. And I need to figure how many Searches I should support
- Test and get feedback.
- Iterate. Get feedback. Iterate. Repeat...
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9

14 Dec 2010

Refynr.com runs on ColdFusion 9 Enterprise now!
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On Rackspace Cloud Servers, Refynr.com has been switched from Railo 3.2 (beta) to ColdFusion 9.0.1 Enterprise, Multi-server (2 CF instances clustered on JRun so far).

Why would I switch from Railo CF to Adobe ColdFusion?
1. It was free:
  After my "Top 14 web startup tools" post over a month ago, Adobe contacted me with a donation offer I could not refuse: a free Adobe CF 9 Enterprise license and free CF Builder license to use for Refynr.com. WOW! I was shocked. Of course Railo is free, too, so read on...
2. My experience is with Adobe CF:
  After I learned about Railo "context", installation, JVM tuning, updates, and slight coding differences, I enjoyed using Railo, and it served me well for the first 3 months of Refynr.com; but, all my previous 10 years of experience with CF has been with the Adobe flavor, so I know the ins-and-outs of tuning, clustering, monitoring, and coding with it.
3. Maturity:
  CF 9 has been out for quite a while now, and Railo 3.2 is still in Beta (but will be released soon I think). It's been on many more high-end systems, for longer, with more bugs founds and fixed, and there's a larger online community to pull from if I need help. I will say the Railo Team has been very helpful and supportive of me and Refynr online, so it's not a knock on them at all
4. Built-in Monitoring:
  The built-in CF 9 Server / Multiserver Monitor and Server Manager is great! And I already have experience using them to manage, monitor, and tune CF 8 & 9 systems. Railo uses FusionReactor, which I hear is great, but I don't have experience with it personally, and it would have cost me money to get it.
I want to thank the various team members, and users of, from Railo who helped me get started, submit bugs, and iron out kinks as I tried to get this startup off the ground.

And last, but not least, I'd like to thank Adobe for this generous donation. It will allow me to run up to 10 CF instances in the Rackspace Cloud, which would have been very expensive or complicated for me to do otherwise. I'm doing this Refynr venture alone with my own cash, so any time and money I can save is a huge boost. As needed, I plan to scale to multiple Cloud Servers, add more CF instances, and upgrade server hardware & RAM to scale with demand. Since I already have experience with this setup from previous companies, I'm feeling a lot more comfortable that I and ColdFusion can handle the future together :D

Any questions or comments?
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11

1 Dec 2010

Reflections on the first 3 months of my solo startup
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After my crazy announcement that I wasn't pursuing a position at another company, but was taking a metaphorical jump off a cliff, I must admit that I wasn't super-confident.

Well, it's been 3 months, and I'm feeling good in some ways, but apprehensive in others.

A little more on my background, to give you an idea of where I'm coming from and how I got to this point:
- My parents were hippies, so my family has always been risk-takers and since I've been "food-stamp poor" before, I'm more willing than others to risk being poor again. Money != Happiness.
- From ages 9 - 22 I was a musician and self-taught composer, who majored in Music at the University of North Texas for nearly 4 year, so I have the self-confidence to learn new things and create from scratch.
- After job-hopping a bit too much, taking risks that always at least were fun and lucrative for me, my wife has been very supportive in trusting my instincts.
- I got kind of burned out on working for other companies after working for over 10 years on many large, enterprise-y systems that became too stressful to work on.
- I still couldn't figure out after 10 years if I'm the right type of person to move into development management, or just stay in Senior Developer/Architect roles. I think I can do it well, but some of the companies didn't seem to agree.
As you can see, I have most of the right type of background to do a solo web startup, but know I'm lacking in some key areas: marketing & sales, building large apps from scratch, and communicating with customers directly. These are the parts of entrepreneurship that keep me up at night but also drive me to keep learning.

A overview of what I've done in the first 3 months:
1. Created some initial buzz: http://solowebstartup.com/want-to-know-what-my-killer-startup-idea-is
2. Got a "Coming soon" page up on the Rackspace Cloud Servers (on Railo with MySQL), while I worked on programming Refynr.com in the background: http://solowebstartup.com/my-startup-coming-soon-web-page-is-up
3. Begged for Alpha Testers: http://solowebstartup.com/i-need-alpha-testers-for-refynr-please
4. Iterated: http://solowebstartup.com/you-can-help-test-latest-updates-to-refynr
5. Added ability to *save* tweets: http://solowebstartup.com/refynrcom-just-got-a-whole-lot-cooler
6. Added Facebook integration: http://solowebstartup.com/dont-miss-anything-interesting-on-facebook-re
7. Upgraded UI with jQuery Mobile (Alpha): http://solowebstartup.com/a-sexier-refynr-now-using-jquery-mobile-alpha
8. Pontificated on "The Social Network" movie: http://solowebstartup.com/how-the-social-network-movie-affects-me-as-an
9. Got a ton of buzz and traffic to my blog and Refynr.com by posting the tools I use: http://solowebstartup.com/top-14-tools-for-my-web-startup
10. Made some ill-advised video demos: http://solowebstartup.com/i-hate-this-part-making-a-startup-video (I'm working on making some much better ones!)
So, what's the good, the bad, and the ugly so far? In reverse order:

The Ugly:
- My design skills: I hacked together something pretty decent looking by using jQuery Mobile, but still can't design my way out of a paper bag... I'll get some profession help when the time comes.
- One of my long-time friends and mentors said I was basically doing everything wrong, and if I didn't do things the same way he did then there's no point in even trying because it will be a big, fat failure. I think he has a different definition of failure than me, so I told him how I felt and we haven't communicated at all since. :(
The Bad:
- Working from home: I still get distracted too often helping my wife and kids. I have mixed feelings, but need to stay focused.
- Missing too much time from work because it's so easy to just pick up and travel from Dallas to Austin. I keep forgetting that I usually lose at least a day, if not 2, of focused work. After Christmas, we must stop that for a while.
- I also get distracted by twitter, FB, etc.... which is ironic, since I'm building Refynr to keep people from betting distracted by Social Media. I have to keep a balance between staying active on SM and getting work done.
- Although I've surpassed my target of 100 Alpha testers, I feel that I've pretty much exhausted my personal reach in getting more users. Most everyone that knows me online (or otherwise) has already tried (or decided not to try Refynr). I need to figure out how to motivate my current users to spread the word about Refynr. I have plenty of ideas... in the coming months, we'll see which ones work.
- Learning to take all criticism (helpful, negative, and down-right rude) as a "learning experience". By blogging, tweeting, and sometimes posting about Refynr all over, it opens me up to a lot of criticism. When I keep my wits about me, I'm able to see beyond the rudeness and improve the product based on the underlying message.
- Not living in our own place. It's great that the in-laws have put us up for 6 months, but it's not the same as having your *own* space.
- Having to severely cut back on programming for a week while my MBP is getting fixed by Apple.
The Good:
- Working on what I want
- Working how I want
- Being able to go work at a coffee shop all day, to get things done with no distractions
- Making lot's of new online connections
- Learning about startups and marketing
- Playing with new, fun technologies like jQuery Mobile, Railo 3.2, Rackspace Cloud, Twitter & Facebook APIs, etc.
- Setting my own schedule so that I don't work more than 45 hours a week and can still have plenty of time with my wife and 2 kids
- Getting exciting when Refynr gets a lot of new signups or web traffic
- Having a blog post get to the front page of Hacker News
- No red tape, meetings, or "personal issues" with colleagues :)
Now I must go back to work!
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18

10 Nov 2010

Top 14 tools for my web startup
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I've been working on my solo web start up full-time for about 2 months now, and so this post is about the software, programming platforms/frameworks, operating systems, websites, and apps that I use to stay fast and productive.

First, let me quickly bullet-point my setup:

Local Development:
- Late 2009 MacBook Pro w/ 8Gigs of RAM
- Railo, with built-in web server
- Eclipse w/ CFEclipse, Subclipse, & MXUnit plugins
- MySQL Community 5.1.51
Cloud Server (Rackspace):
- CentOS 5.4
- Railo 3.2
- Apache 2.2
- MySQL Community 5.1.51
Top tools list:
1. Railo - similar to Adobe ColdFusion, but free and open-source, Railo (I'm using the free 3.2 beta version on my local development environment, which is compatible with Adobe ColdFusion 9.01). It's been great! Even though I've been working professionally with only the Adobe version of CF for 10 years, jumping to Railo was fairly painless, once I learned how to install it properly, etc.
2. Gmail w/ Google Apps - I set up refynr.com mail for GMail and Google apps cuz it's free and very easy to do. I created an info@ address and do all my communication and responding to feedback from there. I also use Google Docs and Spreadsheets for keeping track of competition, Refynr features, ideas, etc. This is a no-brainer.
3. Rackspace CloudServers: cost me all of $43 dollars last month, which included [1] bandwidth for over 70 Refynr Alpha testers (which does a lot of pulling from the Twitter & Facebook APIs), [2] full snapshot image backups of the server, [3] support via email or Live Chat, and [4] engineers that monitored and automatically rebooted my server when it went down mysteriously this past weekend. I'm happy; however, Amazon recently announced free pricing for lower-end cloud servers, and I'm keeping my eye on that...
4. HooteSuite - read and post with multiple accounts. I manage 2 Twitter Accounts, Facebook, and LinkedIn from it. I prefer it over TweetDeck so that I can log in from any computer any time without worrying about installing/updating. Also, the analytics for my accounts and Google Analytics for my websites are nice.
5. CFEclipse - it has great built-in support for Railo, and it's what I've already used for the past 5/6 years, so I found no need to try anything else right now.
6. MyVersionControl.com - free/cheap Subversion hosting, with more features than I need. I just need the SVN repo space (hosted and secure), and use the Subclipse Eclipse plugin with CFEclipse. Simple. Done.
7. MySQL - It's free and I already have a few years of experience with it. I did some preliminary investigation into the NoSQL options like MongoDB and CouchDB, but I don't need massive scalability (yet), so am sticking with what I know for now so that I don't get stuck to often. I'd rather just get er done at the moment.
8. CentOS 5.4 - pretty much an exact replica of RedHat 5.4, so there's lot's of online documentation and help. Plus, it came as an inexpensive option with Rackspace. :)
9. Sequel Pro - easy-to-use, free, and beautiful MySQL client for Mac. It does what I need 99% of the time, but sometimes I need to use MySQLWorkbench (which I found buggy and cumbersome for everyday use) for stuff like updating certain types of indexes or constraints.
10. Posterous - this blog runs on Posterous in case you didn't notice. It's great if I need to do a quick post from email, but I like it more for posting via web, adding quick slide shows, and being able to auto-post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and FriendFeed. I get way more hits on my blog via Posterous than previous platforms I used. This is partially due to making sure it's in RSS aggregators like http://www.coldfusionbloggers.org/ and http://feeds.adobe.com/index.cfm?query=byCategory&categoryId=1&catego...
11. CyberDuck - their website says it all - "Open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files, Google Docs & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac & Windows." (and FREE!)
12. Seashore - Photoshop cost money, and GIMP is too complicated for me. I wanted something simple for common tasks. On Windows, that was Paint.NET. On Mac, it's Seashore! (note: I clearly need some better graphics skillz)
13. jQuery Mobile (Alpha) - it makes the site look good on most mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, etc.), but also looks good on Firefox and Safari. Now, I'll just need to make Refynr.com look decent on IE 8+ and work out the kinks in Chrome. That's pretty good cross-browser/cross-platform compatibility with relatively little effort! And since it's in Alpha, it will only getting better in the next few months... Here's my post about implementing jQuery Mobile on Refynr.com.
14. CFML Open Source code - First, I decided to not use a ColdFusion Framework (even though ColdBox, CFWheels, and FW/1 were VERY tempting) because I wanted to write the core of Refynr.com from scratch and to make damn sure there's no performance issues when/if I need to scale Refynr.com. In my professional career, I have never built anything very big from scratch; I have always worked on legacy ColdFusion code. Here's the open-source ColdFusion code I've used so far:
  - MonkehTweet - http://monkehtweet.riaforge.org/ for Twitter API & oAuth integration
  - Facebook ColdFusion SDK - https://github.com/affinitiz/facebook-cf-sdk/ for FB API integration
  - ValidateThis - http://www.validatethis.org/ for form validation
  - cfUniForm - http://cfuniform.riaforge.org/ for building forms
  - Timezone.cfc - https://github.com/rip747/TimeZone-CFC for timezone management
  - MXUnit.org - for unit testing CF code
Honorable mentions (hope to use in the future) - LogBox, Rackspace CloudFiles, MemCached, MongoDB or CouchDB (?), VirtualBox, Parallels, ManyMoon, Chargify, Selenium, and IETester. And I am testing http://www.feedbackify.com/ for getting feedback off of Refynr.com, but may try http://GetSatisfaction.com at some point, too.

Comment on what tools you use for your startup...
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0

15 Oct 2010

Refynr.com just got a whole lot cooler...
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I got on a roll these last few days, and added the feature that makes Refynr a much more interesting web app now:
- The Refynr Stream: it contains a history of tweets that are saved to the Refynr database. They are saved for you based on the Keyword List you created for your Twitter account.
A little bit of technical detail: the Refynr servers look through your Twitter home timeline (the same one you see on the home screen of Twitter.com when you're logged in) and picks out the relevant tweets, saves them to a database every 30 minutes so that you can view them any time.
If there are no tweets saved to the Refynr database, yet, Refynr will automatically get a Real-time feed directly from Twitter when you go to the Refynr Stream page.
Now that we have the Refynr Stream, we can do some interesting things with Refynr in the near future:
- Send Daily emails with Tweets of interest, so you don't even have to log into Refynr.com to see them.
- Maybe make an RSS Feed of Tweets of interest?
- Do more complex searches and filtering of the Tweets that are already in the Refynr Stream.
- You'll be able to pick a date range to view tweets from a certain time period.
- Anything else you want?
In case you missed this, here's some other new features that I recently added: http://solowebstartup.com/you-can-help-test-latest-updates-to-refynr

btw - follow refynr on twitter :-) http://twitter.com/refynr
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1

10 Oct 2010

You can help test latest updates to Refynr
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The latest updates for Refynr are ready!

Signup: https://refynr.com/secure/signup.cfm (The Alpha Code is Alpha1Tester)

or Login if you already have an account: https://refynr.com/secure/login.cfm

Recent Updates (thanks for all the feedback!):
1. Retweets (RT) and Replies added. In a future version, you will be able to tweet directly from within Refynr.
2. Auto-fill your List. Refynr looks at the keywords you use most often on twitter and generates the List so you don't have to. You can still edit each Keyword, of course.
3. More tweets "refyn'd" in Refynr Stream. Now 400 are refyn'd instead of only 200. Next, Refynr will save more of the tweets from your Friends will be saved, so that you can review them later.
4. Enabled better security. For techies: I've made the logins and secure parts of the site use SSL (HTTPS). Passwords are already hashes, such that your passwords can't be accessed by anyone but you.
5. Improved usability.
6. There's a max of 18 Keywords per List instead of only 14.
7. Fixed some minor bugs.
8. Improved user interface.
Looking forward to more feedback from current (about 40 so far) and new testers.

- Aaron
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5

4 Oct 2010

I need Alpha testers for Refynr... please.
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Okay, this is a very early Alpha version (more of a proof-of-concept) of Refynr.com. It lets you signup/login, connect to Twitter, and then create List of Keywords that let you target what topics you want to see from the people that you follow on Twitter. It's easy for you to try yourself.
1. The Alpha Code is Alpha1Tester
2. Please send all Feedback through the Feedback form, which is a little tab on the right of every page
3. Remember this is an early *Alpha* version, so there can be errors and random problems, etc. I'm looking for honest feedback, though. Fire away!
https://refynr.com/secure/signup.cfm
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0

28 Sep 2010

my startup "coming soon" web page is up
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It's at http://refynr.com/

The website should look like the first screenshot, and I have a little early "Alpha sneak preview" displayed in the second screenshot.

(download)

Click here to download:
my-startup-coming-soon-web-page-is-up-GjrEJotBtayFsHCdDgaq.zip (267 KB)
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1

14 Sep 2010

Want to know what my killer startup idea is?
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Can't find where I read it, but over the weekend I read a blog post that said I'd be pretty stupid not to make damn sure I at least have a handful of people who would actually pay for it. The article suggested that I find a minimum of 10 people who would actually pay real money from their own pocket to use the product. That's certainly better than going off my gut/hunch.

So, here's the offer:
1. Send me an email at aqlong... (hint: it's the prefix for a Google account)
2. If you don't seem like a spammer or something, I'll tell you what my idea is [confidentiality is essential]
3. I'll ask you some questions to see what you think of the idea and to see if you'd actually pay some of your hard-earned money for it
- TIA
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