NewdleBoard
17/04/06 17:20 |
Work
Last week I managed to sneak out a new version of the
NoodleBoard.
I’ve got a lot of paying work on at the moment, so keeping the ‘free-ware’ side of the business up-to-date has been hard. However I was really pleased with the new UI, which was done by Victoria Weston (a London based web/graphic designer) and I’d managed to fix a few bugs so it seemed a shame to sit on it all until the next major functional release, so we sneaked this out the door.
So far it’s been impressive and there has been a marked increase in downloads and sign-ups.
A few people have asked me, “What’s the point in NoodleBoard? Isn’t it just costing you money?”
And, well, yeah, it is. But not much, what it is doing however is proving some very interesting points...
Firstly, the server side of NoodleBoard is running on a virtualized installation of Fedora Core Linux (i.e. a shared server), it is written in J5EE (EJB3) and it all sits inside a JBoss 4.0.x server. And I’ve not had to reboot it once since it launched.
I’ve redeployed the entire server application a couple of times, but the JBoss deployer is extremely robust and I doubt anyone even noticed (and no, it’s not because no-one uses it :)
Secondly, I have learned a lot about selling (well giving away) software and support to end-users. As a consultant I’m all too used to finding solutions to, often in-house, business problems and really letting the client deal with the running of things. Now, I’m getting emails and even the occasional call about all sorts from all kinds of users - most (thankfully) are grateful and pleasant, a few are not.
I try and reply to them all with the kind of reply that I would expect.
Thirdly, marketing has become an interest of mine and it’s up there alongside version control systems and design patterns... I’m finding it fascinating, especially how quickly posts on blogs tend to cascade down and directly affect download rates, even on a small project like this.
I suppose the one thing I’ve learned since launching is that there’s still a lot left to learn. I think that being constantly reminded this is worth the bandwidth fees.
I’ve got a lot of paying work on at the moment, so keeping the ‘free-ware’ side of the business up-to-date has been hard. However I was really pleased with the new UI, which was done by Victoria Weston (a London based web/graphic designer) and I’d managed to fix a few bugs so it seemed a shame to sit on it all until the next major functional release, so we sneaked this out the door.
So far it’s been impressive and there has been a marked increase in downloads and sign-ups.
A few people have asked me, “What’s the point in NoodleBoard? Isn’t it just costing you money?”
And, well, yeah, it is. But not much, what it is doing however is proving some very interesting points...
Firstly, the server side of NoodleBoard is running on a virtualized installation of Fedora Core Linux (i.e. a shared server), it is written in J5EE (EJB3) and it all sits inside a JBoss 4.0.x server. And I’ve not had to reboot it once since it launched.
I’ve redeployed the entire server application a couple of times, but the JBoss deployer is extremely robust and I doubt anyone even noticed (and no, it’s not because no-one uses it :)
Secondly, I have learned a lot about selling (well giving away) software and support to end-users. As a consultant I’m all too used to finding solutions to, often in-house, business problems and really letting the client deal with the running of things. Now, I’m getting emails and even the occasional call about all sorts from all kinds of users - most (thankfully) are grateful and pleasant, a few are not.
I try and reply to them all with the kind of reply that I would expect.
Thirdly, marketing has become an interest of mine and it’s up there alongside version control systems and design patterns... I’m finding it fascinating, especially how quickly posts on blogs tend to cascade down and directly affect download rates, even on a small project like this.
I suppose the one thing I’ve learned since launching is that there’s still a lot left to learn. I think that being constantly reminded this is worth the bandwidth fees.
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