Update: July 30, 2013 - Farmdog is not closed, but I am rethinking everything. Paragraphs will continue to be supported for the foreseeable future.
Farmdog Co. has closed. There had not been a single sale of Paragraphs for two weeks, and over three weeks since there was more than a single sale in a day. Farmdog was a fun project, but flawed in both concept and execution.
For anyone looking for similar functionality to Paragraphs, I highly recommend Byword 2.0 with Wordpress or Jekyll.
In the online help for Paragraphs, I have a rather odd statement:
Farmdog is made of dreams.
That comes from the heart. My company, Farmdog LLC, is made out of dreams. What if I could afford to move closer to our friends and church? What if I could quit the day job and rent out an office close enough that I could bike to work? What if my wife didn’t have to work? What if we didn’t have to worry about money and bills? Obviously, our life would be better. I was foolish with money for a very long time, and now that I’ve wizened up, I’m trying to put things right. Unfortunately, I’m not sure how well I’m doing.
Paragraphs was released earlier this month, and as I wrote on the company blog, I was very lucky to have been mentioned by a few high traffic sites. The initial publicity spawned a good start to sales, but it was simply not enough. I don’t have the budget for advertising, so word of mouth is the only publicity I can get, and without it, Paragraphs drifts off into mediocrity.
That chart is disappointing, but it’s not the end of the world. I was watching a talk by Kevin Hoctor about building a good indie software business, and one slide absolutely resonated with me.
At one point, and I’m paraphrasing here, Kevin says “you can’t just ship your app and drop it after the first month when sales are not what you expected.” Quite true. I found another encouraging quote by Daniel Jalkut:
Always remember that the main thing separating people who succeed from people who don’t is a commitment to keep trying while the others give up.
Knowledge and cleverness are key components to achieving your goals but they pale in comparison to persistence and an unwillingness to admit defeat.
What separates successful people from others is a commitment to keep trying.
I’m not known to be a quitter, and I’m not about to start now. If I can teach my kids anything by the example of my life, I want it to be about being persistent.
So, where we stand with Paragraphs and Farmdog Co. is that initial sales are disappointing, but I’ve learned quite a bit about what the market is looking for, and I’m working hard to address Paragraphs’ shortcomings. However, given that I’m a father of four, I have a full time job, and I’m a freelance writer as well as a developer, there are a few very real constraints that I need to work within.
First, even as I plan for the future, I can’t ignore the fact that my kids are growing up right now. My oldest will be starting high school next year, and I’m teaching my youngest how to ride his bike. Each child needs one on one time with Dad, and all of my work will be wasted if I don’t make time to spend with them. We work so we can live, not the other way around. It is also important to spend time with my wife, fitting in little dates when we can, like a midnight pizza.
Second, even though I have big plans for Farmdog, during the day when I’m at work, I have to give 100% of my abilities to the company that pays the bills. Even when they frustrate me, even when I think I could build a better system on my own, and especially when I’m just not feeling up to it, I need to make sure that I’m taking care of the company that takes care of me and my family. Without the day job, not even the dream of Farmdog could exist. The someday in the future that I imagine is at the least five years away.
Third, I despise debt with a passion I can not put into words. The fact that I have debt gnaws at me, deep in my soul. So, to speed up paying it off, I’ve committed to freelance writing three nights a week, at least. Freelance writing is difficult, but it is good to keep that part of my brain in action, and it is great to keep up with the industry and the open source community in general. It would be easy to focus on the small section that we use at work, writing keeps me engaged and learning new things. Often I don’t feel that I completely understand a topic until I’ve written about it.
So, with all of these commitments, with my life in context, where does this leave Paragraphs? Again, where do we stand? I have to refocus from time to time on the dream. I did not start Farmdog to get rich, I started it to have more control over my life. That’s not something that is going to go away, the dream is here to stay, and, therefore, so is Farmdog. Practically, what this means right now is that work on Farmdog is relegated to the weekends, unless a customer sends in a bug that needs immediate attention. What this also means for Farmdog is that I get time to think through hard problems, and I get to bring a lot of experience to the product. This is why I believe Farmdog will eventually be successful. Paragraphs might not be perfect, but the feature set is well thought out and addressing a market segment that I believe is under-served.
It is my intention to make Paragraphs the easiest way to write online. I know there are a few geek hurdles to overcome, but I’m working on a lot of new things that are a bit outside my wheelhouse to get the product where it needs to be. I don’t want to go into detail, but suffice to say that by the time I’m done, I hope that Paragraphs will be the only thing a customer needs to publish their thoughts online.
So, where we stand with Paragraphs and Farmdog is that we plan on improving the product, slowly and deliberately over time, until we reach the dream. And then, maybe we will start working on version two. (just kidding, I already started on version two) Paragraphs is a labor of love, it will not be ignored, it will be lovingly nurtured.
Every now and then something just gets to me, and for the past few weeks, that something has been the process of purchasing enterprise hardware. Servers, SANs, load balancers, the kind of equipment that, instead of a price and an “Add to Cart” link, comes with directions on who to call.
Most hardware is not purchased directly from the manufacturer. It’s purchased through resellers, and each reseller will have a regional representative who will want to meet with you. The resellers don’t really want to just sell you the hardware, they want to “partner” with you to “build a solution”. They want to add consulting fees to your hardware purchase, and they want to jack up their margin on selling the hardware as much as possible.
It’s not small money we are talking about either. I’ve seen purchases of a single piece of equipment drop by $22,000 by modifying a single software line item. How much of that cost was the actual price of the software, and how much of it was reseller markup we will never know. The reseller program is built to keep us in the dark. For example, NetApp has a few nice bullet points on their “Become a NetApp Partner” page:
The NetApp Partner Program for Resellers is designed to help you grow your business and maximize profitability. With NetApp® products and services in your portfolio, you can deliver innovative storage and data management solutions that satisfy even your most demanding customers.
As a NetApp Reseller, you can:
- Increase revenue
- Earn greater returns on your investment
- Leverage our tools, best practices, and technical experts
- Create opportunities with our co-marketing resources, sales enablement programs, and prequalified leads
The combination of market momentum, increased demand for storage products, and innovative technology from NetApp makes this a great time to be a NetApp partner.
Pay special attention to “maximize profitability” and “increase revenue”, because as a consumer of these goods, that’s money out of your pocket. It’s not that companies like NetApp don’t have a price list, they do, it’s just that the price goes through an algorithm first. I believe the algorithm takes into account the volume of sales by the reseller, the number of discounts available to the reseller, and probably a few other items. I’d love to get a look at it someday.
In fact, I’d love to see a centralize, crowd-created database of hardware costs. A Web site that let me check on what the going rate was on a 10TB SAN. I’m not sure if I could convince anyone to do it, but it would be fantastic if sysadmins and IT managers around the country would upload the PDF quotes they get from resellers. Then we could parse the quotes, and come up with a general idea of what the market price is for the equipment. Right now, we just have to trust that whatever regional reseller we are working with is being honest and not gouging us. Hard to do with the salesmen arrive in BMWs and talk about their private pilots license.
I’ve heard that it is “unethical” to share the quote we get from one reseller with another. I’m not sure about that. I believe that if the vendor knew that anything they gave to us had no expectation of privacy, we would be free to share the quote with whoever we choose. The resellers are the ones deciding the practice would be unethical because it would be bad for their business if they had to fairly compete on price. Personally, I would be satisfied with whichever reseller let me know up front what their cut of the deal was, and how I could calculate the most honest transaction for my company. Dealing with resellers is like trying to buy a used car or a gym membership. It’s shady.
Here’s another example of resellers behaving badly. We were in a meeting with a salesman, and an engineer from his company, and they had a manufacturer on a conference call to discuss the equipment we were pricing out. When we got to the end of the meeting and we thought we had all of our questions answered, we hung up on the manufacturer, and the resellers started undercutting their manufacturer “partner” to try to sell us a similar piece of equipment from another manufacturer. They said it was because they wanted to partner with us to make sure we got the best deal, but I was left with the impression that the equipment they tried to pitch simply gave them a fatter margin.
This is the biggest draw, in my opinion, for open source software and hardware. If we can match the performance of these big name vendors using hardware that we can purchase from NewEgg, we won’t have to deal with slimy resellers.
Mozilla has been one of my favorite open source projects since I first learned of them back in 2002. I remember downloading the Mozilla browser, and thinking that it was just like Netscape Navigator (no surprise there), an all-in-one browser that threw in the kitchen sink, just in case you needed it. You can still download it’s descendant, SeaMonkey. Not long after, I heard about another browser they were calling Phoenix, that, as it was explained to me, pulled out just the web browser from Mozilla, and left everything else alone. I downloaded it, and it was fantastic. Incredibly fast, lean, and simple. It became my favorite right away. There was only one release of Phoenix, after that the browser was renamed briefly to Firebird, and finally, Firefox.
It was an exciting time for the web. The world was starting to get broadband, but most connections were still dial-up. The slow connection speeds and slow computers meant that any small improvements in browsing meant a lot. To many people, the web was Internet Explorer. IE represented upwards of 90% of Internet traffic, so there was a real David and Goliath feel to Mozilla’s snappy little browser. There were many sites that rendered correctly only in IE, and Microsoft was busily expanding their monopoly on desktop computers to the web with FrontPage and IIS. The web could have turned out very different, and I like to think that we have the openness and inclusion of the web today in thanks, at least in part, to the work done by Mozilla back in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s.
Over the years Firefox has both grown and waned in popularity, but the impact of Firefox, and how it helped shape the web should not be underestimated. Today we have several projects that work to keep the web an open platform (like the ubiquitous WebKit project), but the work is far from over. Privacy online is a major issue for the future, as big companies become more sophisticated about tracking your activities on the web, and despite the advances of Firefox and other browsers like Chrome and Opera, Internet Explorer still makes up for the lions share of web traffic.
I’ve used all (or, ok, most of) the different browsers out there, but returning to Firefox always feels like coming home to me. Firefox is different because Mozilla is different. They are a non-profit organization dedicated to making the web a better resource for everyone. In my book, that’s something to be proud of. Mozilla is always looking for people who want to help, so if you feel like being part of something big, you might want to check it out.
In the back of my mind, I always knew that the name “Scout” made no sense. I like the name, I like the bit of a kick the “Sc” at the start of it makes, and the snappy end with the “t”. It sounds good, but there is no correlation between what this application does, and what it was named.
Scout is now Paragraphs.
paragraph ˈparəˌgraf noun
a distinct section of a piece of writing, usually dealing with a single theme and indicated by a new line, indentation, or numbering.
verb [ with obj. ]
arrange (a piece of writing) in paragraphs.
And, as you can see by the image above, we now have a snazzy new icon. I spent a long time thinking about the name and icon, and how they related to the function of the app. I commissioned two icons to be created. The first one was intended to look at home in the dock, and mimicked the “chrome circle with something inside of it” look
It’s a fine looking icon, and I might find some use for it eventually, but I think it accomplished it’s goal of “fitting in” a bit too well. To me, it looks bland, without character. For days after receiving the final icon I racked my brain about what to do. I even got out Photoshop and tried to edit it myself, to no avail. Then I remembered Shawn Blanc’s article about his grandfathers Royal Quiet De Luxe typewriter, and the pieces started to fall into place.
In addition to the name and icon of Paragraphs (I’m still having trouble not calling it Scout), I’ve squashed a ton of bugs, and added a few niceties. If you highlight a word and press Command-I, the word will be surrounded by asterisks, Markdown syntax for italics. Similarly, pressing Command-B will surround the word with two asterisks, Markdown for bold. Finally, highlighting a word, while you have a link on the clipboard (meaning you just copied a link from Safari or another browser), and pressing Command-L will format the highlighted word as a Markdown link. It’s pretty snazzy if I do say so myself.
I’ve put a lot of work lately into the animations, trying to make them as smooth as possible. There is still work to do there, but I think we are miles ahead of where we started. I also have a new theme that will ship with Scout, thanks to Kev Rodgers. Now Paragraphs will have the Default theme, a minimal CSS “Plain” theme, and Kev’s “Fresh Install” theme, which also looks quite nice. I hope to add many more in the future. RSS feed is fixed again, and I’ve put a lot of additional checks into the site parsing code to ensure that Paragraphs can continue running if it can’t build the site for some reason, testing that strings are valid, not null, and not empty, before using for example.
I got word today that the DUNS number for Farmdog Co. has been approved, and will be available to use in two weeks. So, barring any unforeseen disasters, we should be looking at a product launch within the next month. However, I’ve read that you should never pre-announce shipping dates, so take that with a very large grain of salt.
So, quite a bit has changed in the past week or so. I got a lot of great feedback from a few beta testers, and stomped out a few bugs. A bigger deal though came from a couple of people who noted that they got confused in some of the views on how they were meant to proceed. Confusing the customer is absolutely the last thing I want to do with Scout, so I took off my developer hat and put on my HCI hat and tore Scout apart.
Scout now has a proper preferences window, just like every other Mac app. It comes up by hitting Command-Comma, goes away by hitting escape. Similarly, both the media manager and the theme chooser are in panels, keeping the main text editor view clean, and much less confusing about which view you are in, and how to get back to where you want to be. I’ve added a toolbar to the top of Scout, with a pair of buttons to switch between the text editor and the web preview. The other two buttons on the toolbar are to add a new post, and to show and hide the library of previous posts.
I’ve cleaned up the library view quite a bit too, and a added search field to the top which should come up with focus when you open the library. The search field searches both the title and the text of every post, so it should be able to find what you are looking for. The blue background was removed, and replaced by subtle dotted lines separating the posts on a white background.
I’ve also tweaked the image preview that comes up when you click an image link. The image is bigger now, and the background is more of a smokey white instead of the black it was before. I think this change makes the image more viewable, and makes the background fade out better, drawing attention to the image and away from itself.
I’ve fixed a few things about the default text editor theme that bothered me (and John), making it easier to read and overall more pleasant, at least I think so. It looks especially good full screen. In fact, my opinion is that the full screen view is the best way to use Scout.
Finally, I’ve made a few tweaks to the data storage engine, fixing a bug that prevented publishing a site on the first run. Funny story about that. Last week I became a bit overconfident in Scout, and sent out invitations to try it to a group of well known writers that I respect. One of whom replied that he had downloaded and tried Scout, found a laundry list of things wrong with it, tried to publish to a folder, and Scout crashed. I was mortified. Turned out to be a stupid change that I had made, and obviously not tested thoroughly enough, right before sending out the application. I put the publishing code on a background thread to continue user interface responsiveness while Scout wrote out the files. Turns Out, that’s not a good thing. However, what crashed the app on the background thread merely caused an error that Scout recovered from on the main thread, so finding the crash actually allowed me to find and fix a major bug. I just wish I had found it before sending it out.
Live and learn. Test harder next time.
With all of that being said, I really think that Scout is in much better condition now than it was a week ago. I’m excited.
Last week I sent in the certificate of organization to recreate Farmdog as an LLC in the state of Iowa. I have the domain name, twitter account, and a test site built. Assuming everything goes through with the state without problem, Farmdog Co. will be ready to launch very soon.
Scout has a couple of rough edges to clean up before shipping, I need to finish the help doc for it, and fix a couple of odd user interface inconsistencies. But, for the most part, I think Scout is ready to ship. Narrowing the scope and number of features slotted for 1.0 was a big help. I’m planning on selling Scout through the Mac App Store, as well as on Farmdog.co using Fastspring. So, I still have some work to do on Sandboxing, as well as license keys and trial limitations. Probably a few days work to get all of that integrated and tested.
Which brings us to Go2, my professional bookmarking app. I’m rewriting Go2 from the ground up, and I’m pretty happy with how it is coming so far.
When the Mac App Store launched, Go2 was there on day one. It sold well the first month, but was downhill from there. Previously, Go2 had a bit of an identity crisis as it tried to find it’s place. Was it a general bookmarking app like Delicious or Pinboard? Was it a replacement for Command-K in the Finder? When customers downloaded Go2, what were they expecting? As time went on and as I talked to other Go2 users, it became clear that they were using it similarly to how I use it, as a professional bookmarking tool for quick access to servers over SSH, FTP, or as web pages. So, the newest version of Go2 builds on these strengths, and makes it even easier to get to where you want to go. Here’s a quick rundown of new features:
Also, interactions with Go2 are normally through opening bookmarks. So, the main interface is now in the status bar, and new bookmarks will be added through the preferences pane.
Finally, I’ve abandoned core data as the storage engine for Go2, and am in the process of moving the plain text storage engine I wrote for Scout into Go2. Hopefully, this means that upgrades will be easier, and I should, finally, be able to sync through Dropbox or some other file syncing technology. This should make it easier for teams to use Go2 as their central source of truth for network servers.
Like I said, I’m excited about relaunching Farmdog. I’ve learned a lot over the years, and I can’t wait to get rolling.
Eventually I’m going to need to compile this into a proper help doc, but for now, documenting Scout with Scout will do.
Scout handles pages just a little differently than posts. New pages do
not show up on the home page, and are not organized into subfolders
based on date. Pages are converted into HTML and saved in the root of
the site directory, right next to index.html. To create a page, add a
new post, but before the title of the page add the characters @@ .
That is two “at” symbols followed by a space. For example: @@ Contact.
Secondly, the default theme that ships with Scout, the theme of this site, is my own creation that I’ve cobbled together over the past few years. What I hope to see are a few people more talented than I create some really great themes. In fact, assuming Scout is successful, I plan on hiring a designer to do just that. However, there are a number of hurdles to overcome before that happens.
To create a Scout theme, create a folder with the following files inside:
Scattered throughout the files listed above are strings that look like: YYYY_SCOUT_SOMETHING_YYYY. These are the Scout “Y Codes”, as in, “why are they so ugly?” I was looking for something that was unlikely to be reproduced anywhere else, and this was the first thing that came to mind. I currently have the following Y codes defined:
Hopefully, the titles of the codes are self-explanitory, but as I have time I will be documenting them properly. For now, you can probably take a look at how the files in default.stemplate are arranged. Scout looks for these codes in the template and replaces them with the proper data from the posts to generate the site.
Lastly, you should never feel like you need to save your work in Scout.
Scout automatically saves your work at various intervals. For example,
whenever Scout looses focus as the main window, or whenever a new post
is chosen, or when a new view is looked at, Scout automatically saves
the current post as a plain text markdown file saved in
~/Library/Application Support/Scout/Posts/. If you like you can watch
the file being written to in the finder or as you use the application.
Likewise, if you have a markdown file that you would like Scout to know
about, you simply need to name it according to the naming convention of
YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SSSS##Title_Of_Post.markdown and drop it into this
directory. Next time Scout is restarted it will treat this file as its
own.
Scout is intended to give you control over what you write without getting in your way about it. I know there are going to be some rough edges, but as we progress I’m sure they’ll get worked out.
Well, as much as I’d love to procrastinate for the rest of eternity, the time has come for Scout to take it’s first baby steps out of it’s private testing ground and out to a few interested folks who would be brave enough to beta test.
I’m honestly very happy with how Scout is turning out so far. It seems very stable, and now that I’ve worked out a few annoying bugs it is as easy to use as I’d hoped. Here is a quick rundown of supported features:
Since I’m shooting for 1.0 here, there are a couple of features that I’ve intentionally left out because they were simply not there yet.
For one, no syncing support just yet. I have the inner structure to support syncing over Dropbox, or any other form of file syncing, but in practice it is a bit janky, so it will not be supported in 1.0.
Secondly, Scout will only publish to a folder on your hard drive. It will not publish to the web. I’m working on integration with Site44, but as with syncing support, it’s just not quite polished enough to include in the 1.0. With that being said, I’m hosting this site with Scout and Site44, I just choose the Site44 folder with the publish file picker. Works well, but could be smoother. Maybe that’s a 1.1 or 1.2 enhancement.
Anyway, I would be grateful if you would beta test Scout for me. If you are interested, drop me a line on twitter. I’ll get right back to you.
My grandparents house was outside of town, at the foot of the mountains, surrounded by woods. Papa kept his guitar in a black case under his bed, along with his violin. Sometimes, after dinner, if we grandkids begged and pleaded enough, Papa would get his old guitar out and play us a few tunes. They were simple folk songs, sang without any of the southern drawl common in country music. One I remember the most was about his mama sending him to town to buy a chocolate ice cream cone. The little house would spring to life those nights, we would be warm from the fire, and full from Grandma’s cooking, and listen to the simplest, most honest music I have ever heard.
Papa tried to teach me how to play, and I think if I had not been so young and stubborn I would have listened to him. He would tell me where to put my fingers, I would get it wrong, and he would grab my fingers and try to put them where they were supposed to go. It didn’t work out, and so far I have only learned a few basic chords. Right now my guitar sits in the corner of my office, staring blankly at me through it’s black case, waiting for me to bring it to life.
Sometimes a friend will come over who knows how to play, and I’m always amazed at how he can call such beautiful music from the strings of the guitar that I can only coax out a basic tune from. Years ago this friend and few other sailors who shared a place in Virgina would get together to write, play, and even try to sing. For now, learning to play guitar is still on my to-do list, but appreciating honest music has always been close to my heart.
The other day I was helping my daughter do the dishes, and we were taking turns picking songs to listen to while we washed. She would pick out one pop song after another, and as she did I realized that pop music hasn’t changed in at least twenty years. It is still as synthetic and manufactured as ever, pandering to the lowest common denominator. I struggled to find something that we could both enjoy, but almost every song I chose was coldly marked as “weird”.
She has a point, a lot of it is strange. Strange, and a bit raw, unprocessed, analog. I have, so far, 22 albums of the Grateful Dead, most of them live bootlegs from the seventies. There is something about the energy of the live shows, how I can close my eyes and almost be there. Sometimes you can hear the crowd yelling out asking for a song, the Dead hear it and when they start playing you can feel the energy spread through the crowd like wildfire, the beat of the drums matched by clapping hands. There was nothing scripted about these old shows, the Dead would just get up there and start playing.
This is real music, a person and an instrument coming together to create something beautiful. From Papa’s strumming to the Dead’s wall of sound, there runs in my musical preferences a common thread of musicianship, of jamming for the love of the song. I was browsing through the Archive’s library of Grateful Dead shows the other day when I saw mention of a Grateful Dead cover contest. That mention led me to YouTube, where I found one of the best covers of one of my favorite Dead songs:
The Giving Tree Band had me captivated as soon as I heard the violin, but when the steel guitar and the piano started, I was there. It’s not just the song, although it is a fantastic song, and it is not just that they have these instruments, the band appeals to me because it sounds sincere. It is hard (for me at least) to explain the difference in this recording and any other, but I think it has a lot to do with the lack of post processing. I believe I’m hearing the musicians real voice, not a digitized representation of it that’s been leveled and artificially harmonized. I’m hearing the banjo, and the electric guitar as the musicians intend their instruments to be heard.
I love music, even if I would sometimes rather drive in silence. I like to listen to music that relates to me, that’s played by people who might just drop by for a cup of coffee to catch up on old times. Music that makes me feel at home. Music that reminds me of the smell of burning pine, the taste of pumpkin pie fresh on my lips, the sound of Papa’s guitar, and knowing deep in your heart that you are warm, safe, and loved.
