It was thin, but the one gem that you don't hear very often is to approach being an employee as a way to learn how to successfully run a business, rather than a way to get a paycheck. Sound advice for entrepreneurs who, for whatever reason, can't yet take the plunge.
<shamelessplug>...until you have to install a lot of extensions, which you normally have to do manually. This is the problem Flooha solves. </shamelessplug>
This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds?
I'm a heavy user of the DynamicPageList, SyntaxHighlight GeSHi, TeX Editor and Lua extensions and had never heard of Flooha before so I took a quick look. While it looks promising, I didn't see any of those extensions available :-(
Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first?
This looks very cool. Can your system deploy to Azure or other clouds?
Currently, the system deploys only to Flooha servers. The "free" accounts are deployed to an Amazon EC2 instance. The paid accounts are deployed to a dedicated server. In the near future, Flooha users will have the ability to install on any cPanel or Plesk server (99% of the web hosts out there use these) or any LAMP server.
I didn't see any of those extensions available :-(
Also if I select one of MediaWiki v1.14.0 or MediaWiki v1.15.1, choose "Browse Addons" and then follow the hint at the top of the page and click "By app version" and then finally press "filter and sort", I get an empty list. Do you have to actually do a build first?
No, you do not have to build it first. The best option is the default, which shows you addons for all versions (1.14.0 & 1.15.1). Most extensions are compatible with all versions the app. When a user uploads an extension, they might choose to associate it with version 1.15.1, but that doesn't mean it isn't compatible with 1.14.0. So, filtering by app version ensures you only see the version of that extension that is compatible with the app version you are building. I hope that clears it up for you. If not, you can contact me on Google talk as user "flooha" or shoot me an email: matt [at] flooha.com
If more users start to use the system and upload addons, more addons will be available to everyone. It's easy for 700 people to each upload one addon, but quite time consuming for one person to upload 700 addons. If you need help uploading the addons (extensions) you want, let me know which ones and I can help.
I have an interesting perspective on this since my startup, flooha.com is extremely similar, but actually better in some ways IMHO.
First of all, AFAIK, the web platform installer just sets up your PC to be a web server (IIS, mysql, etc...), then installs a default setup for the application you chose to install. So, you can play with it on your local PC, but it is not a public website unless your PC is your web server. So, if you don't have at least a VPS, you cannot use this to create your website. The blogger has it wrong when he says you can install on azure.
Flooha does exactly the same thing, except on a real, public facing web server. You can use it immediately on a free subdomain like username.flooha.com (on an EC2 instance) or you can sign up for hosting and use it to install software on your web hosting account (a dedicated server). There are already other apps that do exactly the same thing like Fantastico, Simple Scripts, Installatron, etc... Nothing new or revolutionary there. We will soon implement the ability to auto-install on any cPanel or Plesk server and the ability for developers to upload their PHP and Rails apps.
It's not clear from the MS web site whether you can install these web apps "in the cloud" (on azure?) or not. Even if you can, do you still get all of the other features of a traditional web host like a control panel, ssh, email, backups, cron jobs, forwarders, statistics, file manager, etc...? If you can install to the cloud, obviously the auto-scaling aspect is great even though most website will never need it.
Flooha's unique service is the ability to auto-install addons. Apps like WordPress now have their own addon (plugin) installer, but many apps, especially new ones, do not. Also, addons that are not in the WP repository are not available for auto-install. This is the gap that Flooha fills, in addition to auto-install of apps, 1-click backups to S3, 1-click restores, private addons and more. If you've ever worked with an app like osCommerce or MediaWiki, you'll know that installing addons is a real pain.
I'll admit to being jealous of MS's army of people working on this as well as their visually pleasing website, but I'm not particularly impressed by the service. I'm curious if sriramk or someone else more familiar with the web platform installer can give more insight on the service and rebutt some of my comments.
If people are really that impressed, I think I need to increase my marketing budget.
His story out of college sounds just like mine. Mechanical engineer, disillusioned with the M.E. environment and excited about computers and the internet. Same time frame too. Glad to see he is successful with his current startup.
One interesting exercise you can do is to write down all of the things that you think would make you the person you want to be and then prioritize and set goals to incorporate each into your life. For example, your list might look something like this:
1) Exercise 30 minutes 3 times per week.
2) Spend at least 1 hour per day playing and interacting with each child, individually, without distractions.
3) Work on startup ideas at least 10 hours per week.
4) Spend at least 3 hours per week participating in your favorite hobby.
5) Only say fuck 5 times per day. ;)
6) Meet one new person each week.
7) Don't tell a single lie for one day each week.
etc...
You get the idea. The key is to force yourself to meet your goals, learn which ones are really important to your happiness and then focus on those. Obviously you can't go nuts and try to do everything all at once, but just making small changes and trying to accomplish something every day can make a difference.
For more practical advice, eliminate the things in your life that cause you pain/stress with extreme prejudice. You have to be really honest with yourself and willing to make tough decisions, but this was the thing that has helped me the most. For me, these things were mostly people.
If you can convey that the upgrade adds value, and they have budget (or can maneuver the politics of getting budget), then they'll pay. The fact that the upgrade adds value (or not) is actually secondary in many cases.
