Wednesday, November 30, 2005 

It has begun

void main()
{

So, in less than 12 hours, I decided to create a service website catering toward the dating/online personals service. I registered the domain and created a temporary webpage as a place holder until I get everything situated.

In the next few days, I will be planning the infrastructure to maintain the data (database) as well as designing the user interface and implementation details of the data retrieval system. In addition, I will be considering how to handle a possible increase in traffic to the current host (inevitably requiring me to provide faster transfer speeds to maintain a large user base)-- however, that is not a top priority at this time.

I never really thought of myself as being an entrepreneur. And I still don’t. What I am doing is creating a service that I would personally be interested in. After all, if I wouldn’t use it myself, how and why would I sell the idea to other people?

Also, since this is more of a side project than a business venture, I will be penny-pinching like crazy. I have no plans on using commercial databases for my data storage. Instead, I will explore open source solutions.

The initial design will likely be situated around IIS (I know I know. yuck) platform. However, the product will ultimately end up on Apache on Linux (likely Fedora). The reason I will be using IIS at first is threefold:

1- It’s already installed on my box and ready to go, allowing me to start coding quicker.

2- I can develop while I’m at that place most people go everyday to earn money because my "day" computer is win XP and it has the Microsoft web services installed as well.

3- The final product will be on a dedicated machine, which I have yet to build and configure.

In other words, there is no point in waiting for the hardware when I still need to test and evaluate the software.

This blog will serve the supplemental purpose of a progress log until the site is complete.

In the mean time, I will be working out the kinks of my new idea-- "uphooking."
}