People have asked me what a blog is, and I have always said it is simply a series of short articles that are automatically sorted in reverse chronological order.
Today, however, when I was reading Evan Williams blog, I came accross a good video that does a really good job of explaining it.
I read a great article this morning about Evan Williams, the founder of blogger.
The article talks about Evan’s ability to take a simple idea and turn it into a useful product. He did that with blogger, which in turn started the whole blogging phenomenon. And he did it again with Twitter, which is starting to gather a huge user-base.
Of course, every time I read something like this, Net-at-hand is in my head the entire time I am reading it. I think about things I could do differently or ways I could improve the service.
Net-at-hand is not a new idea at all. There are probably more services that are similar to it than I could count. The more I use Net-at-hand, however, the more I realize that it serves a useful purpose. Services like blogger or wordpress don’t build the kind of websites that Net-at-hand focuses on, which is more of a general-purpose site suitable for businesses and organizations to use in promoting themselves. And other services are not mainstream enough to have a significant mind-share (be the first thing people think of when they need to quickly set up a website).
Net-at-hand does not do everything that I want it to do yet, but it will. Of course if I had bunches of money, I would be able to spend all my time turning Net-at-hand into what I should be. At the moment, Net-at-hand development is focusing on the pro version, which lets me add features that will someday make it into the regular version. I am working on an e-commerce and shopping cart module which will let people run a store from their Net-at-hand site. I think that the pro version will just become version 1.5 of Net-at-hand at some point in the future.
Anyway, I am off topic. The article about Evan Williams was encouraging to me because he is a great entrepreneur but does not fit into the typical “Silicon Valley start-up entrepreneur” mold.
I definitely do not fit into that mold; maybe there is hope for me yet.
The contrast of subject matter between this post and the last will seem odd, but this blog is about what interests me. So if it doesn’t interest you, then you can go read something else (that is not meant to be as nasty as it sounds).
Something happened this morning that has not happened to me in a long time. It was the energy of creative inspiration, and it felt like I was sitting down and having a conversation with an old friend.
I was going through my morning routine and an idea for a story came to me. I have always had a desire to write and illustrate books for children, but the pressures and stresses of my professional life have always ended up draining the creative energy out of me. Don’t get me wrong, I always apply creativity to the projects I am paid to do (yes creativity is something you can “apply”; it is a tool to use at my discretion).
Creativity, however, is not the same as creative inspiration. Inspiration comes when creativity is applied and a world of content opens up for me to capture. This inspiration doesn’t have to be something “artsy.” Inspiration may end up as a story, a painting, a web application, or even a company.
I guess, and I am thinking as I am writing so this may not hold up under scrutiny, that inspiration is what happens when an idea comes along, and the artist is able to grab ahold of it and see it for what it is. The inspiration comes from the fact that what the artist finds in the idea is more than what he was expecting; it has a largeness to it. It is that largeness, or greatness, that energizes the artist in his work. It is a view of what can be and a desire to get there.
I hope that my idea from this morning lasts. I have written it down and there is no reason that I shouldn’t act on it. Who knows, it may end up on this site sometime.
This information is mostly for my own reference later on. I was looking up which ports I needed to open up in my IPTables configuration for my email server (which is also running nginx).
| service | port |
|---|---|
| http | 80 |
| https | 443 |
| smtp | 25 (2525 is an alternate) |
| pop3 | 110 |
| pop3-ssl | 995 |
| imap | 143 |
| imap-ssl | 993 |
The last three days of last week were spent building my own email server. Can I just tell you that it was fun, rewarding, and the biggest pain I have ever had to deal regarding web server administration.
My email has been hosted on a site 5 hosting account for about a year or so. When I first switched to site5 from dreamhost, I was thrilled with the level of service and the level of performance of their servers.
Well that all has gone down the tubes lately. What originally drew me to them was that they limited the number of customers that were on each server. Their plans no longer say this, and the large number of sites running on the same server has caused increasing outages over the last couple of months.
Besides the outages, there firewall started blocking access from my home network for some reason. They fixed it pretty quickly, but it made me wonder how reliable service was to the server from other locations (like anyone wanting to send email to me).
Then I noticed that that server’s ip address was black-listed by several email servers (I guess someone was sending spam from it). So it got to the point that I could not rely on email coming in and email going out. So I created a gmail account so I could get reliable email service, but I wanted to get back to being able to use my own domain’s email.
So, I went ahead and created a new VPS with my current host, slicehost, and started looking for tutorials on setting up an email server. There are many different ways to do this, and none of them are particularly easy. Here is the setup that I decided on:
Now for setting up the server, I basically followed the instructions in this tutorial. I liked this tutorial because it explained concepts and then gave a list of steps (rather than just a list of steps). It is much easier to trouble-shoot problems when you understand what you are doing.
Now, the tutorial is specifically for debian linux, and my VPS was setup using fedora8 (I use fedora by default because they keep up packages for nginx, my web-server of choice for rails projects). This was not a real problem other than the postfix that is installed with yum is not built with mysql support. So I needed to get a fedora8 rpm and build it with mysql support enabled. I got instructions for doing that on this tutorial here. I only used this tutorial for the url of the fc8 rpm for postfix and then instructions for building with mysql support. I had to install some of the packages that were listed at the beginning of the article, though I am not sure which ones are required for sure, so I just did all of them. Also, I did not install the patch for quotas because my setup uses dovecot as the LDA.
So, after three days of messing around and pulling out hair (the pulling out hair was mostly because of things that I had not configured correctly at first), I have an email server up and running. I spent part of the day-after building a small rails app for administering email accounts, so now I have an email server with and easy web interface for setting up accounts.
I have been debating for awhile about what I should write about on this site.
I think I have decided I want this website to document what I have done and how I have done it regarding my professional life. Hopefully the “how” part will be helpful to others who are doing similar things (it will also help me remember how I did something if I ever need to repeat the steps).
The “what” part of that equation will be about building Net-at-hand and a web business built on and around it.
In a way, this site will chronicle an internet-startup of sorts; the startup being the hosted web-publishing system I created. This isn’t a startup built on a new idea, but it is a solid idea. And there is enough room in the market (ways to create websites) for all the different players that are there. All I have to do is make sure my product is easy-to-use, stable, and then market it.
Well, we will see how this goes.
Today is the day I have been dreaming about for the last year.
The weather has turned cooler; last night the low was in the upper 50’s. So I put my slippers on, made myself a decaf latte with coffee I roasted last night, and I am sitting on the front porch with the macbook working on adding the calendar function to net-at-hand.
Oh, and yesterday was a momentous day, I got my first paying net-at-hand customer that I am not related to. Of course, things got messed up when he actually tried to pay for it (some bug I had inadvertently put in there since the time I finished work on the payment controller). But that is all squared away; I refunded his first month’s payment for his trouble.
This is the personal site of Mark Whitcher, a designer, illustrator, and web developer based in Pensacola, FL.