myShoggoth

The last year and a bit

Hey, I feel like bloggin!

I suspect this is due to the product I'm working on finally being at a point where I think it is usable and useful for enough of the target market that I'm willing to really talk about it and seek out feedback at a bigger scale.

What I'm talking about is VCHub, and the way we like to think about it is we're modeling the startup ecosystem.

There's a lot more to creating a successful new company than just the people in the company itself.  You have law firms, accounting firms, advisers, investors, so on and so forth.

We started with, and the core of the product still is, an online capitalization table.  This is where all the investors, including company founders and employees, are tracked and what portion of the company they own under what terms is tracked.

Most companies currently track this information in a custom Excel spreadsheet, maybe they got it from their law firm or got a hand me down from another company.  I'm not going to spend time in this post on why this is suboptimal, for many I think it will be obvious, and for those who have been in the trenches dealing with the situation the problems are very well known.

Around this core of knowing the corporate structure we also track service providers for the company and those who work with it who may not have a direct investment or option grant.

Then you add on top of that the ability to share this information with others, like the previously mentioned service providers, potential investors, advisers, and so on... and I think we have a compelling product that helps solve an area with lots of current pain, mostly in terms of how much time is sunk into managing, updating, and sharing this information.

I'm going to start to blog about the product, what we're doing, and how I'm building it.  I'm very interested in feedback on all aspects, particularly around technology and how users see the space we're modeling.

The whole thing is early yet, we have beta users and a customer advisory board (and I'm hoping both sets will read this and let me know what they think of where we're at as we go along), but others are certainly welcome to try it out and help influence what direction we take it.

iPhone post

At the gym, on a stationary bike, and I thought to look for a SixApart iPhone app. Sure enough, there it is.

Does this mean I'll post more? Who knows.

A little TOO quiet

I haven't been posting here much for a while, there are a number of reasons for that but one of the big ones is that I was posting in a different blog.  That one was password protected and hidden from the world so I could reveal it as part of an intricate birthday present plot for my dear friend Karrie.

I revealed the present a few weeks ago and talked to her about making the blog itself public, which I've just done.  I'm still working on getting a real domain for it, haven't found one I like that isn't squatted, but in the meantime I'm opening it up in case people are interested in following along.

A big part of the present is that I will continue to keep it up to date, another post there is expected tonight.

And I need to start posting stuff here, too...

I'm Famous!

Well, I'd better be.  Soon.  Go make that happen.  I'll wait.

A good friend of mine referenced my musings on the future of Hollywood and the Internet and the Writer's Strike in the new episode of his podcast Sturgeon's Law.

The strike itself is over, but the causes of the friction are just beginning.

His podcast is great stuff, highly recommended.

gapingborg

I've been really busy recently, and mainly because of this I have been very very slow about reinstating all my RSS feeds and ignoring the fact that I haven't installed RSS Bandit on any of my machines after leaving Microsoft and so on.  I'd like to say that I'm very surprised that Hugh MacLeod (gapingvoid.com) is doing work for Microsoft but it was pretty clear when I was last caught up reading him that he was interested in doing so, especially while Robert Scoble was doing his good work there.

I got an email on the Seattle Tech Startups list about a Geek Dinner with Hugh scheduled for Friday in Seattle, and this reminded me to subscribe to both gapingvoid and Scobleizer.  Plus I'm going to the dinner, and really looking forward to it, I tried to meet up with Hugh in Paris many years ago but it didn't work out.

I'm really interested in seeing how Hugh's efforts with Microsoft goes.  I remember talking to some people in the company about using his ideas a couple years ago or so and there was no real interest at the time (or at least in my group) in doing things any different than they had always been done.  The major obstacles will be dealing with the entrenched bureaucracy, in that case being famous outsider consultant is likely to be more effective than most insiders.

The dinner should be a lot of fun, hope to see some people I know and meet lots of people I don't.

myshoggoth.com has moved!

I've got all my content from the old http://www.myshoggoth.com/ ported over, plus I moved all the posts from http://myshoggoth.spaces.live.com/ as well.  Now I've got all my content in one place and I'm very happy about it.

On top of that I got the DNS aliasing working with TypePad.com so they're hosting it as myshoggoth.com, and I have a design I'm quite happy with.  Maybe I'll add a few graphics or something in the future, but not much.  I like clean and minimal.

At this point I'm pretty sold on staying with typepad.com for this, it is up to them not to convince me otherwise over the next month.

Hopefully anyone with RSS subscriptions to myshoggoth.com will come to the site to see why the old URLs aren't working anymore rather than just delete and forget.

Trying out TypePad

TypePad (from SixApart) wisely has offered a 31 day free trial blog, and that was enough to get me to open an account, play around with the site look and feel, and then port laboriously all my existing content over to see whether I like it enough to pay them cash monies for it and have them take over control of my http://www.myshoggoth.com/ domain.

I like the look and feel I've gotten so far, it is pretty close to my original and retains the simple and readable style I was going for.  I can't get as fancy in some respects, although they seem to give me the ability to download/upload their styles.css directly so that might be a good way to get around any UI limitations.

I still need to try out the Photo Albums, TypeLists, and archiving ability, but things are looking fairly good right now.  A very bad sign was that last night while moving posts over all of typepad.com went off the net for 20-30 minutes.  Other people's blogs that were on TypePad, their main site, the whole thing.  Talking to some friends they aren't maybe known for reliable uptime...

Porting the content was a huge pain, why their 'Import/Export' functionality isn't able to work from an RSS/Atom feed blows my mind.  There's a standard, why not use it?

My main website host (pair.com) offers Movable Type as well, so if TypePad proves to be too flaky I might be able to move everything including looks over relatively painlessly, and for less money per month.

One thing I'm certain of is that Windows Live Spaces is not going to work for me, so now I've moved away from CityDesk self-publishing and WL Spaces, and I'm not really interested in writing my own although that has been tempting in the past, so it looks to me like the choice really is between typepad.com hosting or pair.com hosting Movable Type.

Still searching for a good blog tool

Not that I have enough free time to really do anything about it, but I would like to have a real blog tool to run on my real domain and be, you know, real.

I hoped that Windows Live Spaces would do it, but I just ain't happy.  I can't run it on my own domain, I wouldn't want to anyway, and it takes slow to a new level.

I just took a look at Movable Type (at least the version on LiveJournal) and I really hate the web editing, which is how I normally do it now that I can.  I guess it is time to take a look at the other options out there and find a favorite, then see what hoops are required to get it up and running on my domain.

Fun.

FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, WINDOWS LIVE SPACES TEAM, MOVE THE TEXT IN A COUPLE PIXELS FROM THE DAMNED EDIT BOX BORDER.  WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

Still undecided on blogging location

I've been more and more tempted to move back to http://www.myshoggoth.com/, but unsure about which platform and such to use.  I've been tempted by Typo, since it is RoR based and at least I know I could customize it.  As I investigated it, however, it seemed like it was in a weird limbo state with very little good information.

myShoggoth is hosted at pair.com right now, and they offer Movable Type for $6/mo.   Although I don't like the idea of upping my month bill for it, I can't help but wonder whether it would be worth it.

Anyone have Movable Type experience?  Is it that good?

Windows Live Spaces Woes

I'm currently working very hard at not giving up on WL Spaces and writing my own blog engine in Ruby on Rails back on http://www.myshoggoth.com/.  It took me maybe an hour total to get something reasonable up and running, it would probably take another two to get a reasonably featured thing going that would do pretty well.  The main thing I'd miss is a WYSIWYG editor, which I admit is a big enough deal anymore to cause my heartache.  If I could find something out there I could plug in that would be very cool.

Spaces are freakin' slow holy crap.  And it doesn't even seem like most of the content is the problem, it looks like specifically their little Me Area in the upper right (which probably does COM calls to Messenger to extra information, and in many cases will fail for the maximum COM timeout) is the main culprit, but many of their other controls not only are slow and cumbersome but also get in the way of the rest of the entire experience.  Is that the Gadgets thing?  Maybe I could just rip out most of the content from the Space and it would perform better.

Of course, now that they've shipped with something like that there's no way they will admit they screwed it up and punt it for a better user experience, that would be tantamount to admitting they were wrong to ship it in the first place.

So. Frustrating.

Updated:  Yeah, looks like the "Me Area" in the upper right and the Profile gadgets are the big offenders, so I'm getting rid of the latter and cursing endlessly at the former until things get better.  The Photo gadget may be part of the problem, too.  It is crap anyway, so I won't lose much by getting rid of it too.