manythingsblue

Storyblue updates

I recently released an awesome new version of Storyblue that includes goals and charts. In a nutshell, we track your daily writing progress and chart it for you, so you can see at a glance how many words you write per day, what days are the most productive, etc. We also let you set goals, such as, “I’d like to write 1200 words per day,” and Storyblue will track your progress against that goal.

Having trouble staying motivated writing? Try Storyblue, now with spiffy goals and charts.

(You can follow the Storyblue blog here, for more frequent updates on Storyblue!)

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27
Apr 10

Storyblue has launched!

We’ve retired our classic novel planning application, NovelPlanner, with the release of Storyblue, the new and awesome novel-planning and writing software from manythingsblue.

Drag-and-drop characters, scenes, and notes to plan your book, then write it in a simple, distraction free interface.

Check Storyblue out here: http://storyblue.com

Photographerblue official launch!

Photographerblue is live!

We’re building the best place for you to find a photographer. If you’re a photographer, Photographerblue is the best place to be found by clients.

Search by price & location. Scroll down the page to load more results, without having to click Next a thousand times. View each photographer’s price, location and contact details on their profile page.

For photographers, sign up completely free! You can stay with the free listing, or upgrade to our Standard or Premium listings for more visibility. We’re rolling out new features often, so keep checking back!

You can follow us on Twitter (@photoblueapp) for updates, or subscribe to this blog.

Feedback is welcome! You can e-mail me directly at taylor@manythingsblue.com.

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08
Feb 10

Photographerblue updates

Added an about/FAQ page, added some non-US states to the list.

I’ve been discussing the purpose and vision of Photographerblue in the comments over at the Launch! post — if you haven’t read it, go do so and feel free to add your thoughts! I’m open to feedback, and I’ve enjoyed the discussion with Neil.

The About/FAQ/Feature page I just added is a direct result of that conversation; I hope it clarifies some of what we’re trying to do. Let me know if you think it could be improved (comment here, or email me at taylor@manythingsblue.com).

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06
Feb 10

Launch!

All righty, cap deployed Photographerblue.com a minute ago. Go check it out, if you’re a photographer, sign up right now, and if you’re not, why not? Anyone can be a photographer, just grab a camera (preferably disposable) from KMart and start a-snappin’!

Just kidding, really. Not everyone can be a photographer. We could spot your amateurishness in an instant, if you had a listing on photographerblue. Because we put your actual photography front and center. You know, like ‘good photos’ are the most important thing about a photographer. Weird.

Check it out at http://photographerblue.com.

Now I start the fun, markety part! Wish me the best of luck.

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02
Feb 10

Photoblue progress

I’m committing a bunch of changes that I think wrap up everything on my to-do list. I’m getting a photographer friend of mine to check over my price ranges and make them realistic. Once that’s done, I’m deploying and launching wave 1.

The first part of my release strategy is the photographer sign-up portion. I’m going to market this on photographer blogs, sites, wherever, until the database contains enough photographers to be worthwhile to potential clients.

I’ll be perfecting the search interface at the same time as this.

Once I have enough photographers, and the search interface is polished beyond reproach, THEN I launch to the general public.

Here’s a thumbnail screenshot of what the search interface will look like:

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27
Jan 10

Goodbye Dreamhost. Hellooooo Linode.

So, I spun up a new Dreamhost PS to run my awesome new photographer site on, and it immediately goes down. Dreamhost posted about it at 9am yesterday (1/26/10), and it’s still down. Not cool. I had heard horror stories about DH before, but hadn’t had any problems with my other Dreamhost PS that Coupley runs on.

So after 30+ hours, I shut down that server and signed up at Linode. I was almost going with Slicehost, but read this performance comparison (found via Hacker News) and was sufficiently convinced otherwise.

So far, awesome. I followed their tutorials, and in 3 hours I set up Rails/MySQL/nginx, and updated my Capistrano config to deploy to the new server. After fiddling randomly with the nginx config, I can see my site! Well, to be honest, I can only see [domain].com — www.[domain].com doesn’t work. But I have time to fiddle with it before I launch. Still need to finish some testing.

Anyway, that all went way too smoothly for someone who knows only the bare minimum of Linux. But I’m not complaining. At least now if my site goes down, hopefully it’ll be my fault. :)

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25
Jan 10

What I’m working on now

My side projects tended to cycle pretty quickly, as I would pick up a new framework, language, game engine, breathing technique, try it for a few weeks, and flit on to the next thing. I had a full-time job doing .NET web stuff, so that wasn’t a big deal. :)

I did write a novel planning app back in the day, called (cleverly) NovelPlanner. It’s a Windows desktop app, .NET 2.0. I’d love to someday add a bunch of features and make it awesome and useful, maybe rewrite for Adobe AIR. I want to add a novel writing part that integrates awesomely with the planning piece, and all sorts of other cool things. Right now, though, is what it is — index card replacement, basically.

Anyway, wrote and released, and starting selling copies! Not many copies, true, but I still sell a couple a month. Learned a lot about software development, and going from nothing to website + selling was a huge learning experience.

Main lesson: Writing it is the easy part. ;)

Next!

In 2008 I started playing with Ruby on Rails, and started writing Coupley, a private, life-tracking/journaling web app for couples. I worked on that for over a year in bits and pieces of spare time, ruthlessly focusing on functionality over flash to get it done. Finished v1, learned a lot about subscription handling, RoR, deployment, and tons of other stuff. Launched at the end of December 2009.

I’ve done some initial marketing, and I think Coupley has potential, as it expands and grows more couple-focused features. Right now I’m still competing against blogging software, and I’d rather move from journal-focus to life-tracking focus, and make it easy and useful for planning trips and stuff like that.

Currently…

I’m about to ‘pre-launch’ Photographerblue, a site that makes it reallyreally easy for people to find wedding and portrait photographers. Think Sortfolio, just for photographers.

It’s in RoR, again, and I’m way better at it this time :). I’m going to use Spreedly, which (so far, using test account) I’ve loved the ease and simplicity of, and PayPal Payments Pro.

I’ve been working on this full time for about 3 weeks now. A post is coming soon detailing how I went start to finish in < 30 days. :)

I think the site's got a lot of potential, and I've got lots of different markets in mind where I think I can apply the basic concepts. I want to launch the basic photographer signup part, then once I have X-hundred photographers, launch the consumer facing side and start marketing.

Wrap

So as you can see, I have 3 products out there; NovelPlanner and Coupley aren’t being actively marketed at this point; I want to focus on Photoblue, since it’s got, I think, the most immediate revenue potential, and that’s very important to me right now ;).

As a one-developer company, I think focus is warranted in this case; I’d love to, and I plan to, build both NovelPlanner and Coupley into prettier, faster, easier, better things than they are, but I don’t have time to do that and work on Photoblue.

Wish me luck! I need Photoblue to succeed, and have basically 4 months to make it happen.

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13
Jan 10

Welcome

Hi — thanks for coming by. I’m Taylor, I own and single-handedly run a company called manythingsblue. I don’t know why it’s called that either. A mystery, perhaps.

I’m full-time on manythingsblue since 01/01/10, which at least bodes well for me as a technology company. :)

I blog here about what’s happening, and what I’m working on. If I learn stuff, I want to share it, so hopefully you find something useful!

Hi — thanks for coming by. I’m Taylor, I own and single-handedly run a company called manythingsblue. I don’t know why it’s called that either. A mystery, perhaps.

I’m full-time on manythingsblue since 01/01/10, which at least bodes well for me as a technology company. :)

I blog here about what’s happening, and what I’m working on. If I learn stuff, I want to share it, so hopefully you find something useful!

Welcome to manythingsblue! We built Photographerblue, Coupley, and Storyblue.