theAdmin.orgGrowing a simple software business

In a previous post, I setup custom data with Redmine to track specific criteria with my development projects. Since then I have written a plugin to make tracking scores easier. Like my other plugin, I’m releasing this under the GNU GPL v2.

Alpha Release

Unlike my other plugin, this one will be undergoing some major changes soon so it should not be used on a production system. I’m releasing it early to get some feedback for the next release, which should be production ready. If you could help send some code or suggestions, please visit my bug tracker.

Purpose

This plugin will let a user score a project on different criteria. I use it to score my consulting projects and pick the ones that are the best fix for my business.

Features

• Projects can be scored based on user defined values
• Score groups can be setup to rank a project in different areas (e.g. Profitability, Fun)
• Total score for a project is calculated

Install

1. Download the archive file and extract it to your vendor/plugins folder. You can also download directly from my Subversion server using Rails’s plungin script

    script/plugin install svn://dev.littlestreamsoftware.com/redmine_project_scores_plugin/tags/release-0.0.1
   

   Or the very latest copy:

    script/plugin install svn://dev.littlestreamsoftware.com/redmine_project_scores_plugin/trunk
   

2. Follow the Redmine plugin installation steps.

3. Setup the databases using the migrations.

    rake db:migrate_plugins
   

4. Login to your Redmine install as an Administrator

5. Enable the “Score Module” permissions for your Roles
6. Add the “Score module” to the enabled modules for your project
7. The link to the plugin should appear on that project’s navigation

The database setup includes some default data, feel free to change it or add your own using the Rails console.

Help

If you need help you can leave a comment here or enter an issue directly into my bug tracker.

For a couple of months now, I’ve been considering writing monthly goals for myself, but never quite seemed to get around to it. So when Eric offered me the opportunity to write a guest post for theAdmin.org and suggested starting my own progress reports I jumped at the chance.

So here it is, my first Monthly Progress Review. In the future, I plan to post a review on my own blog at the beginning of each month. Since I think that marketing is my weak point, that’s where I’ve chosen to focus my goals for now.

January Goals and Actions

1. Add 40 more RSS subscribers to my blog

Despite what it looks like, this wasn’t stolen from Eric. Towards the end of the month it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to meet this goal, since I’d been stuck at 25 new subscribers, but just in the last couple of days there has been a jump of 17 more subscribers.

Goal accomplished, plus some.

2. Write 4 guest posts

This month I wrote the following guest posts…

1. Avoid Freelance Horror - 6 Lessons from Stephen King on Freelance Folder
2. Focus and Flow for the Insanely Interested on Jarkko Laine’s blog Insanely Interested in Everything
3. 3 Ways to Become More Productive by Drawing on Your Inner Artist on Productivity in Context
4. And of course, this post itself.

Goal accomplished.

3. Create an AdWords campaign for one of my niches

I accomplished this goal fairly early on in the month. Haven’t had great results from it yet, but I’m looking to improve that.

February Goals

1. Add 60 more RSS subscribers to my blog

Since I met my goal for January, its time to up the ante a bit, and I think 60 new subscribers will be enough to be challenging without making me insane about it either. Want to help me out? Go ahead and subscribe!

2. Write 4 more guest posts

I have been very happy with the success of my guest posts so far, but I also want to maintain a high quality of posts on my own blog, and at this point, I think that 4 guest posts per month is a good balance.

3. Obtain at least 2 guest posts from other bloggers

Related to the goal above, I think it would be good to feature a couple of guest posts on my blog, both to get more of others’ perspectives, as well as to give me the opportunity to focus on some very high quality posts. If you’re interested in writing for my blog, contact me.

4. Optimize my AdWords campaign

While I think my keywords are good, I need to rewrite the ads and landing page to increase clickthrough and conversion rates.

5. Release a free WordPress theme

This will be my first attempt to create a theme for a broad audience, so I will also be asking for feedback on the theme before it is released.

6. Outline an ebook and write one chapter of it

I’ve had an idea in the back of my mind for a short (25 page) ebook for a while now. This month I intend to take the time to draw up a formal outline and write at least one chapter of the content.

Lesson learned

If you are posting quality content on your own blog and leaving quality comments on other people’s blogs, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll ask you for a guest post before you ask them.

Thanks to Eric for letting me guest-post!

Joshua Clanton is a freelance web designer who blogs about design, productivity, and creativity. If you liked this post, you might also like 18 Productivity Haikus - Get Things Done and Achieve Inner Peace through the Power of Poetry.

Was able to start to catch up on some developer links I had bookmarked this week:

• No True “mod_ruby” Is Damaging Ruby’s Viability On The Web - Peter Cooper wants to know why there isn’t there a good mod_ruby for Apache.
• Merb 0.5.0 is out - Hot on the tails of my last set of links, Merb has just released their latest version. It sounds like their next point release will be separated into the core and extras.
• loupe.js - Cool JavaScript library to “zoom” over parts of an image. It can also display part of another image under the magnifying glass (X-ray).
• Reinventing the Clipboard - Coding Horror talks about the limitation of the Windows clipboard to only hold one thing at a time. Linux and Emacs have had multiple clipboards for some time now, it’s amazing Microsoft hasn’t added this feature.
• 2007: The Ruby on Rails Year in Review - Very nice review of the progress Ruby on Rails made in 2007. Let’s make 2008 even better.

Your personality says a lot about you and how you react to the world. Several months back I found a programmer personality test that will describe how you like to program. Today, I decided to take it again to see how I’ve changed.

Originally I took it along with all the other programmers where I worked, and the results were valid. The guy who loved writing tight data structures in C was a “Low Level” programmer and the one who stringed 10 function calls on a single line to save space ended up being “Conservative”.

Both times, I came up as DHSB. Not a bad type for a freelance programmer:

• Doer - I would rather get the general idea of a feature and then dig into the code. Most plans change as you start implementing.
• High level - I love Ruby and she loves me. I’ve been flirting with Common Lisp just to learn how it’s macros work.
• Solo situation - I prefer to work on a solution by myself or with a few people. I’ve seen too many bad ideas result from large meetings.
• Liberal - To help support my High level, I try to build up abstractions in my code to make it easier on myself and my team. Since these are usually used by many people, I try to be extra clear so to prevent misunderstandings later.

I had my friend Peter Chester take it and he said this would be a good way to help decide who should work on a specific project. Got a prototype? You will want a Doer. Need an embedded driver for a cell phone? Low level is for you. Need a n-tier system? You will want a Team.

What personality type are you? Does it fit you?

Eric

Every businessperson makes mistakes, but how do they make up for them?

Today 37 Signals had a major outage on all of their websites. These websites are used by thousands of people every day to run their business, including me. I found out about the outage when I tried to lookup the phone number of a customer I was about to call. Luckly for me I had a copy of the number some place else.

It turned out that the outage wasn’t 37 Signals’ fault, but it did impact their customers. These customers pay to have access to their websites, and to use the data they have stored in them. Once the services were back up 37 Signals issued a great apology and even offered to go the extra mile for their customers:

… While we don’t have a formal service-level agreement (SLA), we still want to compensate anyone who felt they were negatively affected in their work because of this outage. Please write support@37signals.com and we’ll get that taken care of. …

Any business that didn’t provide a SLA like 37 Signals could have just said “Yep, we had downtime. Sorry, deal with it”. Instead they are offered to help the people who were affected, even though they have no obligation to. This is how a business should deal with a mistake, even if it isn’t their fault.

It even appears they took the same action in the past and tried to do their best to make it up to people.

So how does your business handle mistakes? Are you proactive and try to go the extra mile to please your customers?

Eric