My baby* (MrKurt) by MrKurt
I recently quit my job and moved to the sticks** to work full time on a bit of my own software. It’s really very exciting.
The software is actually a continuation of a teeny little site I whipped up (which is no longer online) back in college for a class project. Since that time, I’ve dinked around with it in my free time, devoted some nights to it to get Ars Technica up and running on it, and generally felt as though I haven’t made much progress on it.
I started looking at options for working on the thing full time about four months ago. One of the first things I did was create a spreadsheet and figure out how much I thought it would cost to develop and market it for a year. The number came out smaller than the total credit limit available to me on a couple of cards. I figured I’d quit my job, and toil away while accumulating copious amounts of debt.
Fortunately, things worked out slightly differently. I was able to acquire a few contract projects that would cover the bare minimum of living expenses, so no crazy credit card debt required (yet). We’re not precisely “rich” and we’re beginning to really enjoy the luxury that is Ramen, but it’s not an entirely bad way to live.
The publishing system is shaping up nicely, and it’s been wonderful to have a week and a half to work on it full time. At the moment, it’s designed specifically for webzine*** sites, much like Ars Technica. It’s very good at handling a couple of different types of content such sites generally publish, mainly blog/journal style sections, multipage articles, and the few supporting single page/non-content things that every site needs.
The coolest portions of it come directly as a result of using Lucene.net for backend indexing and querying. Handling multi-value metadata queries is cake with Lucene and much more flexible than trying to build listings using SQL queries. This is important for two sites that will be using the system in under a month.
For instance, it’s awesome to be able to pass “(Body:xbox OR Tag:(360 OR PS3 OR PSP)) AND Author:(kurt OR bill) AND Featured: true” and get back the right results.
It’s an odd type of application to work on, though. All the real effort is put into the administrative side of it, which maybe 15 people see per day. The majority of the “users” who browse the site don’t really get to see some of the more interesting stuff.
* Not my real baby
** Tulsa, OK ****
*** The word webzine really needs to make a comeback, it’s so descriptive and distinct from a “blog”
**** Cost of living in Tulsa is cheap to the point of being free. And yes, that was a recursive footnote asterisk