let someone else do it [10/18/2006 03:44:04]

Can't sleep. I've got a lot on my mind.

I've got a friend doing some part time work for me. I've been showing her how to handle the common support tasks. We ran into the usual problem of how to delegate. She installed roundup for me a while back. I've read the design docs for roundup, and it's really really cool. It's also a huge pain to set up, and, while it has email integration, it's more suited to a bug tracker than a help desk.

So today we installed cerberus helpdesk instead. It's designed for support. You tell it where your mailbox is, and it parses the emails and sends them to all to a database, and you can put all kinds of rules in place to say who should deal with it. It seems like a really nice system. You even get the source code (PHP), and the 3-user license is free.

Meanwhile, I hired 50dollarlogos.com to make a logo for my new tutorial site. They promise 3 designs in 72 hours. I think they might be just a one man shop. Whatever. The guy sent me logos today. They're a heck of a lot nicer than what I came up with. I'm pretty sure I'll use these guys again.

My tutorial site is about javascript. Yeah. Not python. Nothing that requires installation or configuration or anything like that. All you need is a browser. And the app is an arcade game.

My goal of releasing my web framework is looking less and less relevant. Who's the target market? Web developers who don't want to use Rails or Django or Turbogears? And what's the benefit for me? That I can hire people? How many people am I likely to hire? I wanted to offer up micro-contracts for developers. My problem isn't that I can't handle the programming. I'd be writing all kinds of code if I could get the support desk under control. And with a solid marketing process bringing in sales, I could afford a small support staff. If I hire a developer at some point, I can train that one developer. Training is expensive, but not nearly as expensive as documenting and promoting a framework and competing for mindshare with three other big projects.

I don't know. It really seems like all my reasons for having that goal have faded away. The software is still good stuff. I like having full control over my tools, but I guess I just don't see much value in sharing it anymore. At least not for its own sake. What does make sense is creating an application that solves customer problems as opposed to developer problems. And I have the core of an application (amoeba) that can do some really cool stuff, and I have ambitions for a real content management tool (rantelope) built on top of amoeba that goes way beyond just blogging. Maybe I should just focus my energy there.

We'll see. This week, I'm writing my game. Next week, I'll write the tutorial. Meanwhile, I've got PHP5 to install and a support desk application to learn, and email to answer and right now, I really need to get some sleep.