What I'm up to and building next

I thought I'd make a quick post on some stuff I'm working on and thinking about doing. I hope your staying safe and doing what you can to keep safe. Here in Ireland we are just entering even tighter restrictions but the important message is to stay home and stay safe.

I've found my focus to be a bit all over the place with everything going on, some projects I have been working on are just not important at the moment and likely won't be or have a market for a few months while the world recovers.

The truth is I don't think anyone really cares too much about my social media marketing tool and that's ok so I don't think I can benefit from marketing it.

New Posts for Serversncode

I have a few in the drafts I will be finishing off in the next while and publishing them. I've been working alot with actor models and service buses lately so I have a few posts on that. I have some posts on using MongoDB, in setting it up and then using it with different API's, including using it with Azure functions which I think could be really interesting.

Contentr

I launched Contentr a few months ago now. I have a bunch of upgrades coming in the next week. These change how it does it's RSS Sync and automation making it easier and more flexible. I'll also have another blog post coming all about contentr, what happened post launch and about the changes I'm making.

New Ideas

Well sort of new, I've had a few ideas running around in my head for a while and in my idea notebook and with everything that's going on I'm thinking of taking a go at a few to try and build some prototypes, these would be basic versions not really MVP's my idea was to take the pressure off building working products and just go back to solve a problem, generally my own problem.

Photographr.app

So as some of you will know I'm also a photographer. The problem is I don't like the site I have currently, I built it myself and I could take the time to rebuild it. Before I did that I looked around for a good CMS or platform to build a simple photograhy site and I couldn't find one.

There are alot of good website builders out there but they are all so generic for every market so actually building a tool that works for a photography site becomes really difficult fast, I don't want something high maintenance.

So I have started to work on the idea that I can build it myself, What if I built a site that makes it easy to build and look after your website for photographers.

The idea is you would pick a template and deploy your site, load photographs and build your portfolio.

Below is a first look at what Template 1 would look like.

Not only do I want to store a portfolio of photos, I want to organise them and sort them by gallery, Seascape, landscape, astro, etc.

• I want to be able to add new photos easy and build my portfolio.
• I want to start selling prints.
• Selling a collection of stock photos.
• Have a contact form on the site.

These aren't difficult things to do but pulling so many different services together to make it work can be time consuming and takes away from what I want to do.

So like an engineer I'm thinking of going after this one and building photographr.app

I'm still sort of stuck between building it as a static site generator or sort of CMS for photographers.

Commented.app

As might have noticed, I removed the comments from this blog. I really disliked that other comment system (that I shall never name!) there are a lot of reasons not to like it, so I got to thinking about building my own version that would address the issues I have with it and provide you with a really good and quick experience.

It will be Javascript based, I'd be able to inject the comment board into any of the blog posts.

In the back end I would have better functionality to moderate the comments and turn them off and on by post.

I would love to offer the option to subscribe to a newsletter from the comments section.

What now

The big question, do I think these could be products in their own right, Yes I really do but the first step is to solve my problem.

• Build a new photography site that is easy to maintain and update.
• Restore comments to this blog.

This is when the prototype stage comes into play. This will allow me to build it out and just see what is in these ideas with no expectation this will be a working product.

Then we go to the MVP Stage, this is the bit when I try to turn these prototypes into working products that anyone can sign up for and get started.

And then I'm building a full product again.

I plan on being more open about the products I'm building and doing it right here on this blog.

It is time consuming to write updates on building products but I've been thinking I might start sharing more about it. The biggest issue I've had with it is finding the balance of sharing behind the scenes stuff and then actually growing the product. So we'll see what happens.