volomike

Dan, some solid advice there, and with a track record of experience. Thank you so much for the great advice. Now to convince my wife that I need to go 100% GPL or do the mixed license thing with CSS, images, Javascript files as proprietary.

I think it's Oracle. It usually starts in the accounting department. Someone from Oracle calls them up and convinces them that they need to spend oodles of cash for a financial package, but that package requires an Oracle server. Now, they can't justify paying that huge price, so they tell the entire IT department that they're going to dump whatever database products they were using for most of the company departments, and switch to Oracle. Once that's established, the IT department staff learns that Oracle is a big pusher of Java, so all the coders have to switch to Java. Eventually they want to get a promotion, so they learn they can get Java certified and either catch a promotion or go to another big company with those skills.

When I was doing Java coding, guys would argue in boardrooms for months about design patterns and system architecture, looking fairly important to the boss, never really getting anything accomplished. I was so glad to switch all that to a forward-thinking company that used PHP and PostgreSQL -- we knocked out code really fast and spent less time arguing in boardrooms. Sure, we used design patterns, but we didn't get overly academic about it like the Java guys did.

Now, anyone trying to introduce PHP or PostgreSQL into a Java/Oracle shop would find it really hard. These guys want to keep their certifications relevant. The Java guys will say that PHP is a hack with the inconsistent parameters, and claim it's nothing more than juked up Perl. If they permit it at all, they'll call it a "template language" to be used only for the front-end. The Oracle guys will say that PostgreSQL isn't battle-tested enough like Oracle, lacks sufficient replication and migration tools, and tell you the tech support for it isn't as good as Oracle's. Then they'll scold you for considering PostgreSQL over MySQL since Oracle owns MySQL now. And when they go in that direction, they'll say, "Yeah, MySQL is great only for tiny stuff."

As for "rapid development teams using Java" -- LOL, that doesn't exist as far as I've seen in the Fortune 1000 companies I've worked in. Rapid, as in take 1 year to argue about the system design before you start coding it? Yeah, that's about how rapid it is.

Here are a few options:

- specialized WordPress Plugin development and sales

- making Android or iPhone apps

- making HTML5 apps with a mobile phone framework, and which work on Android and iPhone phones

On getting programmers, you'll want to keep trying, and putting comments out in forums and anywhere you can. I advise you to find some programmer in or near your timezone so that you don't end up playing the timezone game. And you'll likely want to check in another hemisphere. For instance, if you're in NYC, you could consider contacting some developer in Brazil.

facebook.com = 12 chars

gmail.com = 9 chars

Gmail wins.

The font looks too Star-Trekkie, somewhat Romulan in fact. Nice for a logo, but sucks to see that on all the windows.

Remember Nautilus? There was a particular version of Ubuntu that shipped where Nautilus folder doubleclicks kept opening new windows rather than using the same window. DID NOT WANT. And unfortunately Ubuntu shipped with that. The community pushed it back, and so in the next release they knocked that off. So let's hope they don't ship this font as the standard default font.

I appreciate them trying to improve the interface, but forcing everyone from right closing windows to left was too drastic in 10.04 LTS. I quickly reverted back to Clearlooks.

Prediction: ReactOS will be little more than an OS used for running Windows-less video games that were designed for Windows.

In the time spent fiddling with it, you could have just purchased and XBox and been done with it.

As a developer, I try to "get in the minds" of other developers sometimes. I try to think, "If I had to build this same system, and ensure it was tuned properly, how would I be building it?"

However, I interact monthly with other SEO guys and learn from their thoughts on what they see from the trenches with their content. They commonly tell me that they think that the Google search engine is not fully automated -- that flags are sometimes raised and low-cost staffers react to those flags when enough go off. From there, low-cost staffers filter out the false alarms and escalate to a core team for manual analysis. This makes the most sense. I mean, if you were Google, building the greatest SE on the planet, it makes sense to automate as much as possible, create tools to collect flags and let low-cost staffers check these flags and escalate or ignore issues, and then have a core team do manual reviews to find areas to improve in the SE code.

I recently googled ugg boots and found that the lawyers for UGG told Google to de-index some sites that had ugg in the domain name. That's uncool.

I knew a guy who had "timex" somewhere in his domain name and the lawyers for Timex did a cease-and-desist on him.

These trademark and IP lawyers are crossing the line because they know they can go after small-time operators who can't afford the legal team to fight them. And then that sets a legal precedent of a long series of wins that gives trademark and IP lawyers more ammo to use on even more cases, like a snowball.

This is autoblogging. This won't work. Google will see the blog theme fingerprint and will either lessen the index or de-index. Also, the dupe content is another factor that gets you de-indexed.

Now if they used a generic, common theme, and different themes; and then if they used unique, synonymized content -- these things would perhaps get past the Google filter unless of course something triggers a manual review at Google and a human checks it.

A site has flags at Google (that's the theory) and if you throw enough flags, then it sometimes triggers an automatic de-index or PR lessening. In some cases, and again this is all theory, it triggers a manual review and they have a human review what's going on to see if they need to alert the core team on a search engine tweak.

Because you need to hit bottom first on this issue before finding that bottom and deciding, enough is enough, and moving on. Just like you're beginning to do now, in fact, by making this post.

Trust me -- many people have been here where you are.

You appear to have the entrepreneurial spirit. The world needs more of us, actually. But get there wisely. Plan, prepare, make the exit, feel the "sink or swim" period, get used to it enough in the lows so that they don't scare you as much anymore, and then you'll soar just like I did.

Of course, having a spouse with a stable income sort of makes it a lot easier. :)