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!)

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

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.

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).

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.

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:

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. :)

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.

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!