ktharavaad

I've had some experience using drupal and while it can be frustrating at times, my overall experience with it is pretty positivie. I've used it mainly to build websites for clients, these are the usual bread-and-butter variety sites for small businesses. So let me address some of his points.

>>> Drupal is Freaking Hard to Use and Has a High Learning Curve <<<

The author uses the "layperson" as the targeted audience yet the only alternative he offers is rails. Yeah, enter rails, a layperson would have to learn programming, database, deployment just to get a rails site up. Comparing this with the WYSIWYG interface of drupal, I'd say the latter is much much easier for the lay person.

in my experience of working with clients clients, most of them haven't found much trouble making minor edits to the site itself after I've set it up given them some instructions. For me this is godsend compared to 1, doing things the old way of giving them static pages and having them email me every single time they need a change or 2, using my custom cms-like solution which is buggy and hacked together.

For these simple CRUD type operations, drupal is simply the easiest way for the lay person to modify a pre-built website.

>>>>Drupal’s Design is Piss-Poor<<<<

Inheritance? Objects? Keep in mind that drupal was started back then in 2001 when PHP didn't have any real OOP capabilities and that heritage carried through. As for the issues with upgrades, most modules and templates..etc shows prominently what version they are compatible with and if you use the correct versions, it usually doesn't break.

>>>>consider hiring a Ruby on Rails developer<<<

There are so many useful things that are built out of the box for you in drupal, the taxonomy system, thousands of modules for all of the most common operations and a generally helpful and supportive community. Through modules, you can get internationalization for free, you get a free forum, a free user-groups, blogs..etc. You also get a pretty good degree of customization with the Views and CCK module for the edge cases. I really don't see how building it yourself from ground up can be a money saver for 95% of the common cases.

And why specifically rails? compared to other web frameworks like Django, does rails offer something that makes it especially scalable, easy to learn or especially suited to the CMS type application?

From what I know, the Django admin site, its apps system, better documentation and python's consistent syntax makes it easier to learn and more suited for CMS type applications. And if you use Pinax for the some of its out-of-box functionality, it makes life even easier.

>>>Chicago Boss is fully asynchronous, using one single process to handle hundreds or thousands of simultaneous requests<<<

>>>All other web frameworks will break down and cry if you ask them to process more than a few dozen simultaneous requests on a single machine.<<<<

Isn't this what facebook Tornado, Orbited and all the other servers using select()/epoll() solves?

Well, its like saying that you should sue the police when your house got robbed instead of the robber. Scribd is the one with the intent of gaming the system, Google just wants to provide relevant search results, so its clear to me who should shoulder the blame.

upped because I hate it when every time i try to search for something, there's a scribd link for something TOTALLY IRRELEVANT to what I'm looking for on the front page of google masquerading as real content. I don't like their SEO practices and I think the company should change its tactics.

Ok. So we've had Thinkature, Yvew, Dabbleboard, dimdim..etc..etc and a bunch of others. Did any one of them really make MONEY after webEX was sold? So whats so different about this one besides a nicer interface?

That being said, Congrats on the execution, its a very nicely done flex app. However, you might want to set

horizontalScrollPolicy=off

verticalScrollPolicty=off

for the itemRenderers of the HList of your Camera chooser page, because on my mac, the Label control overflows and cauese the scrollbars to popup.

Good luck guys!

Well, posting on YC is a good place to start. There are also a lot of events tailored towards geeks, startups, programmers which you can attend and try to make some friends.

Also, Instead of emphasizing on your personal stats ( 30 year old, wife, kids ), why not talk about your vision and ideas, if people find them interesting, they'll probably be more willing to talk to you about them.

Good luck on your search.

My suggestion is to chop it up and develop it piece by piece.

Looking at your app, it seems to do a lot of different things such as:

- Form Editor

- Calendar

- Permission based file access system

You could build just one of these components and get it out of the door and see how the market responds to your product and then evolve the product from that point onwards. Chances are that what you will end up with will look nothing like what what you have in mind.

Good luck on your venture.

I'd stop peddling your HotOrUnderaged app here since your other links were already killed.

Granted its not your fault but sometimes that just how things are.

If you want to promote it, I'd recommend spamming myspace or something, its the more appropriate audience.

Its kind of unfair that only big companies can get this sort of competitive advantage while smaller startups are stuck paying taxes through their nose under the draconian tax policies of the US government.

There should be a guide or services for smaller companies and Startups to incorporate in tax shelters so they too can enjoy the tax benefits and thus level the playing field with the big boys. Are there such resources around?

Some feedback and thoughts on Picurio after playing with it for a bit 1) Sweet interface, looks very iPhoto-like

2) I like the fact that the interface is built with Objective-J/cappacino, it feels more "native" than flash, which is what a lot of similar apps use

3) At the same time, the interface can be "broken" sometimes in that it doesn't react like you expect it to, for example, modal dialogs don't close when you press the "escape" key and the alert dialog ( after registering ) don't close after pressing the enter key.

4) Right click doesn't work.. would be nice to have a context menu to do various operations.

5) Shouldn't the loader only allow image files? I tried to upload a .pdf and it seemed to work (progress bar showed up..etc ) but afterwards it doesn't show up in my library.

6) I don't know about the whole "room" concept, I mean.. whats wrong with albums??

7) Although the cappacino based interface is super awesome, I could also see this limiting what this app can do, I mean, if its done in flash, you could do all kinds of cool stuff like the rest of the functions in iPhoto..etc

I think you should be a little more specific in order for people to give you any real advice.

From what I can see, all of the ideas which you have listed deal with viable markets. HR, E-learning and Problem-Solving(??) are all useful domains but whether you will succeed really comes down to how you execute your startup.

But I do applaud you for sharing your ideas with the community, I've seen way too many people who are so secretive about their idea.

His advice on - giving music out for free at un-DRMed format in exchange for email - and using the email address to sell premium goods such as signed personal items..etc

sounds remarkably like the advice in the Seth godin's "Permission Marketting" book.