beyond measure

Last month my friends and I had an idea of a website startup. I can’t share the details right now but it will be a free service website and I don’t know how to make money out of it yet. But that’s what makes it fun. Even if it’s not gonna be successful, what’s important is I tried and I learned from it. Anyway, my friends are gonna work with me on this, they liked the idea as well. One of the preliminary decisions was choosing the right platform for our current situation. Here are my thoughts and options:

• Ruby - Ruby on Rails — while this is what I wanted the most, it’s just not possible right now. We couldn’t find a hosting service that we can afford for this. And we’re all currently beginners on the language so we’d most probably be crawling all the time when working on the project.
• ASP.NET - ASP.NET MVC — this one looks really tasty as well. We have strong skills in ASP.Net development and some of us has already worked on the new MVC platform for ASP.Net but the general feedback is it just isn’t quite stable yet. For the hosting there shouldn’t have been a problem at the start cause we know of a hosting service that’s cheap enough for startup websites. Of course, it will be quite expensive if the site grows.
• Python - Django — I read a lot of recommendations about this one. The problem is I don’t know much about Python, much more on how to deploy one. I would
• PHP 5 — it’s going to have to be this one. PHP’s one of the easiest to deploy and from what I see is the cheapest in terms of hosting requirements. Also most of us already know PHP so there shouldn’t be any problem there. We’re choosing between Kohana or ZendFramework for the framework. It’s more fun to start the project from scratch but it’s gonna take longer to develop so I don’t think that’s gonna be one of our options.

I’m getting old. Really. And I’ve only realized this not too long ago. ^_^x I’m turning 27 this year and I haven’t mastered, I mean really hardcore, any programming language or field. I’m always into so many things trying to be a jack of all trades. I don’t think that’s possible. Possible only if you have nothing else to do in your life but programming. Luckily I’ve come to realize that life is never about work. We work only to live.

So, I’ve decided to focus more on these technologies > .Net, Ruby on Rails, and AJAX. And maybe a little Java here and then. To start with that focus, I’ve just recently transferred to a .Net hosting and I’m currently looking in to transfer this Wordpress blog to a .Net alternative. Probably a CMS or another blog engine. From all my extensive research, I’ve reached to these final three: DotNetNuke, Umbraco, and BlogEngine.NET.

DotNetNuke seems to have a large following, but it seems to be bloated and I had a hard time trying to find an installation manual. Looks like the manual is greatly hidden in their forums. Well, I’m not going that road. Forums are just too messy for my taste. Even though I got it installed in the end, that took a lot of google searches. Well, the default theme isn’t exactly presentable in this Web 2.0 age. I think they really need to update that one.

BlogEngine.NET seems to be a very powerful blogging engine. My friend John got it installed here, and I didn’t hear any complaints about the installation so I think this is really a good candidate. It even has a “tag” feature already. I’m pretty sure my default install of Wordpress didn’t have that.

My last and looks like will gonna be my choice in this dilemma is Umbraco. I’ve just gone up to reading everything in their site right now and I’m liking it already. Next step is to try and get this installed in my machine. Let’s see how easy it’s gonna be and if it’s compatible with my hosting. I’m looking forward to a CMS than a blog-focused software cause I’m gonna put up a site in a subdomain for an open source software that I’ve been planning on working for months now.