What is FromJumpStreet going to be about? It’s going to be about all the things I’m having to learn and relearn, starting from zero, or near enough to zero that it shouldn’t make a lot of difference to you, the reader.
I’ve started this blog because I’m suddenly having to make a bunch of changes in my business and because I’m facing new challenges.
So let’s talk about what I’m doing. First, I’m doing (or redoing) a lot of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and internet marketing and pay-per-click advertising and second I’m going to learn Ruby on Rails, having already recently started with the Mambo Content Management System and the Simple Machines Forum bulletin board system. I started on the internet fairly early, in 1995, with my website, Florida Incorporators, Inc. Shortly after putting my website on a local IPP I put up I put up a personal site called the Florida Entrepreneurs Resource page. The sites have had only minor cosmetic changes in the intervening years, switching at one point to Microsoft FrontPage for authoring the sites. In the meanwhile GNN, my original ISP (I picked them because I got a CD-ROM in the mail) which originally hosted the personal pages, has been absorbed by AOL, and the latter has become a crumbling neighborhood where no one wants to be seen anymore.
Recently, something changed in the business environment and my order flow dropped off by about two thirds (I know what it is, perhaps I can fix it but for competitive reasons I can’t go into detail). It was time to use the extra time to do some marketing. So I bought a handful of domain names (basically variations on www.florida-entrepreneurs.com) and moved the content of the site over to an implementation of Mambo, meanwhile I also integrated Mambo with the Simple Machines Forum BBS.
Ruby on Rails is an integrated system of writing applications for the web and has some terrific buzz in the last couple of years. Proponents claim it’s 10-20 times faster for the programmer than any other system, and relieves the programmer of a lot of the drudgery and detail work. I’m all for that. I haven’t written much code since the early ‘90s, and even then I was writing sophisticated, detailed macros for Lotus 1,2,3 and not programming in any language a programmer would respect. I did some FORTRAN programming in college-level classes in the early ‘80s (I actually had to work on punchcards at one point, though they were already seriously obsolete at the time). But my first experience with programming was writing BASIC code when I was ten or twelve in a program for gifted children. So again, I’m starting basically from jump street. As well, I plan to build my own PC from mostly new parts (this is something that’s second nature for a lot of people, but despite the fact that I installed my own hard drive on an AT&T 6300 PC in the mid-‘80s and have put in a lot of new hardware in the intervening years, I have never actually put one together all by myself from scratch (and I bet a lot of other people haven’t either) and I plan to retask the old one to run Kubuntu or another Linux distribution. All in preparation for launching one or more websites designed to see if I can replicate even a fraction of the success that has been experienced by Markus Frind, the current cynosure of the business internet for having singlehandedly created a dating site, www.plentyoffish.com that threatens to become number one in the dating space, but with a twist: no offices and no employees, just a guy
The whole idea for this blog came from a Zdnet article describing the author’s thesis for why Linux hasn’t had greater public acceptance: the public doesn’t know how to install it and start doing anything useful with it. I’ll see if it’s really so daunting and describe my experiences. Finally, since this blog is written on an application called WordPress, I’ll talk about setting it up and getting started with it.
So this blog has a lot on its plate from the outset. I’m sure there will be a few detours, but I hope some readers will stay with me and that we’ll have some fun.
[...] A couple of quick notes. First, the completion of the Ubuntu box and its successful boot yesterday fulfilled what I said I set out to do in one of my earliest posts: http://www.fromjumpstreet.com/?p=3#more-3 [...]