Most of us will spend at least some time in August either glued to our tv screens or the lucky ones will be in Beijing, watching from the sidelines, cheering on dedicated athletics go for gold. I’ll be sat in front of my tv screen with the Seedcamp 2008 application form wondering whether or not I should go for it.

Unfortunately I don’t have last year’s application form to compare it against but I’m sure that they have made the process more intensive to weed (sorry about the pun) people out of the process early on.

The form is enough to put anyone off, especially as if you are really a start up shouldn’t you be busy trying to get it off the ground? The amount of time (and money) spent trying to go for Seedcamp is I think at least 3 days to complete the form, then if you get invited to interview - that’s another day… and this is on a per founder/person basis…. plus the opportunity cost of you doing something else during that same time.

However, I will say that some of the questions, although absolute stinkers are very, very good ones and damn hard to answer when I think of inkscroll. I obviously haven’t thought inkscroll through enough!

http://seedcamp.com/Seedcamp-app_and_guidelines_2008.pdf

I’m sure that all of us in our lifetime have tried to learn a language whether it be a spoken dialect, work terminology, or a programming language. And there are several ways aren’t there? There’s the nice structured way, perhaps in a classroom? Paint by numbers, the self-taught option using a book, the web, a bunch of tutorials, trial and error, the list goes on and on.

Well, I can’t being in a classroom nor am I a good painter so I tried to learn Rails by throwing myself in the deep end; looking at the inkscroll code and found a couple basic “Hello World!” Rails application tutorials on the web to try out. However, I didn’t get far and was out of my depth staring at inkscroll code trying to make sense of it. In the end I had to go out and spend my hard earned ££ on a book. Amazon has over 40 books on Ruby on Rails, hard to choose… in the end, I went for Agile Web Development with Rails: A Pragmatic Guide (version 2). Yes, its got a long title, its out-of-date and its based on pre- Rails 2.0, but I got to peak inside before buying it and liked the layout and style of the authors (congrats!). Plus paying £18 on the Internet instead of £29 from a bookshop kind of appealed to me. It’s 720 pages and I know that it will be a handy reference guide away from the screen or a great door stopper.

Anyway, after a couple of hours reading and flicking through, I tried out its tutorial led examples. Very impressive. I had to concentrate and learn how to resolve things that had changed since the book release and what’s currently out there at the moment. A sharp learning curve (had to learn how to get around a new IDE environment) but after a couple false starts it is being to look less hazy. I might just take another look at the inkscroll code. But in the meantime, I hope they come out with a new version soon for Rails 2.1.0!

When I originally filled out the trademark forms back in January I wondered why the process took so long and I should expect to have something within 6-12 months. Since then, I’ve realised that in getting bogged down in all the development and day-to-day stuff, paperwork is the last thing on my list when really it should be my first!

To be fair, The IPO turned my application around real quick but, ah hem, I didn’t (*blush*). Luckily I got a reminder letter the other week and quickly (two weeks later!) sent off my response on a couple clarifications of the classes and my agreement of the wording on others.

I now have my fingers crossed…. waiting…. hoping…

Now I haven’t done any coding for the last… hmmm let me think…. 7 years and counting. So its safe to say that I’m a bit rusty (understatement of the year). So there I was embarking on how to get the inkscroll development environment set up on my laptop, and no, its not a mac

Eight painful hours later managed to get inkscroll running on my laptop - Wohoo!

For those of a geek orientation whom I’m sure are dying to know what I did in those eight hours. Actually, you’re probably asking eight hours? What took you so long, I could have done it in half an hour!!

Well I surfed the ‘net for a least an hour or so and as a result downloaded quite a few software applications which are all freeware (a great cost saving). Here’s my shopping list - all Windows based:

- mysql database

- mysql gui tools i.e. query browser

- subversion (version control software)

- tortoise (a nice windows UI for subversion)

- apache (then realised I didn’t need it)

- eclipse (development environment) + plug-ins for subversion and Ruby

- Ruby rails and gems (a lovely name for add-ons)

I then had to install them all and configure them. Once the errors were resolved (thank goodness for Google), I then went about writing my first RoR application. I tried the famous cookbook tutorial - soooo out-of-date it doesn’t work. It was updated by someone else - cookbook2 - again, out-of-date. Finally I found a tutorial called exchange, this time it worked! Next up I grabbed the inkscroll source code and got it running on my laptop!!

Now I need to play with the inkscroll environment and understand its code base. Luckily Mr.X wrote it very neatly that even I can understand it!

Useful links.

1. Setting up the Eclipse with Ruby development environment:http://www.napcs.com/howto/railsonwindows.html

2. The Exchange Tutorial: http://fairleads.blogspot.com/2007/12/rails-20-and-scaffolding-step-by-step.html

It’s been 2 weeks since all development on inkscroll ceased. It feels a lot longer than that, more like 2 months!

What have I done in that time? Well, I’ve searched the Internet looking for RoR developers. Anywhere. Checked out all the main freelancing sites and didn’t come across any that caught my eye. Moved on to just random php/RoR developers that had their own websites. I found a few. Three in the uk, so I contacted them via email with a brief outline of what I was looking for. Strangely enough all three answered and gave me their daily rates which ranged from £250 through to £380 a DAY!

So, I pondered and pondered …..

And in that time, none of them got back in touch asking if I needed more info or offered to call etc. I wonder if its because they have:

i) too much work on,

ii) don’t want my business,

iii) or perhaps its just another firsthand experience of poor customer service in the UK.

I thought I found a potential ‘youngster’ but after having a call, providing him with more info, I’ve heard nothing back since - I guess he’s not interested. Oh and I mentioned that my daily job was looking for developers as well, I’m just too nice.

So I’m resorting to the fact that maybe I have to do it myself. Great, me learning to code, again.

Welcome to my personal emotional roller coaster ride. This week has been the most difficult so far in inkscroll’s history. Let me tell you why.

Monday - hit a low - canned my website redesign as none of the revised designs with a dark header really caught my attention. The best one was a friend of mine who’s a graphic designer came up with the best one of the bunch. but still I wasn’t drooling over it.

Tuesday - went even lower - I found out that inkscroll has a competitor, a UK one with powerful backers.

Wednesday - a high! yay! - milestone 2, which was about Contacts, was completed. A definite high.

Thursday - how low can you go? rock bottom - my developer dropped a bombshell. Due to other commitments he can no longer continue work on inkscroll. With immediate effect.

Luckily I was sitting down when the email came in (he could have at least had the guts to call me?). I had to take a walk to cool down after venting to the room at large with a few choice swear words thrown in for good measure.

So its, midnight on Thursday and inkscroll is dead in the water.

Some people might take this as a negative sign, otherwise known as ‘time to give up?’. I’m not one of those, well not yet anyway! This just makes me even more determined to get inkscroll out there in the public domain. And this is a classic example as to why its so much harder to do internet bootstrap startups in the UK.

I now am on a search to find a good replacement developer, wish me luck.

Spurred on by the knowledge of a competitor M2 (milestone 2) is now completed. We now have contacts!! It’s similar in concept to social networking in how people link up but is greatly simplified and totally different in terms of purpose all at the same time!

M2 took 72 man hours (including a few change requests from M1 that I sneaked in - project scope creep FTW!)

Negotiations on M3 have started…

Damn, damn, damn and a few other unprintable words.

It was only just a matter of time. inkscroll has a competitor. A UK competitor. A competitor that has got a head start of at least 2 years. And it’s already out there in the public domain. And its got serious money and people behind it (of course we’ve got money and people too - just a lot less of both!).

Bother.

This just goes to show that its the execution of the idea that counts, not the idea itself as there is no original idea.

On the bright side, it proves that inkscroll has ‘legs’ (remember that stool?) and its always good to learn to adapt and when best to learn but when the race is on.

Time to regroup, think, plan and action.
Bring it On!

So my website redesign project didn’t work out so well. I couldn’t decide whether or not if I liked a black header as a background so I sat there and pondered it for a few days (not literally of course).  Unfortunately the black look didn’t grow on me, so I cancelled the redesign project. Luckily the graphics designer hadn’t done a lot of work on it and was happy to not charge me as per our original agreement of $400.  Nice to know that there are still nice, honest people out there in the world that you can just have an ‘Internet’ relationship with!

Back to the drawing board…..

Hi everyone, sorry that its been a while. I’ve been testing the results of M1 to death and also M2, leading me to the conclusion that you can never do enough testing. I’ve spent hours and hours testing. During this process we changed a feature in M1 which led to me losing at least 3 hours work and now I have to spend another 3 hours work putting it all back in.  This is just one great example of why currently the inkscroll.com website is closed as its not even at the pre-alpha stage!
What’s in Milestone 2? Well, its all about having a Contacts section of inkscroll, but not quite the traditional social networking type. Yes, social networking is getting old…!
I’m looking to sign off M2 by the end of the week and next up is funnily enough M3!