triple|scape

Well, I’ve finally started working hard on the enterprise syndication product. Things are moving right along!

Since this application is based on lots of semantic web technologies, I first need some way to store my RDF and query it. There are a few open source and commercial applications out there to do this. But, having a terminal case of Not Invented Here Syndrome, I decided to roll my own. I had some old code from an earlier (abandoned) project that I used as a starting point. But I totally re-implemented the storage engine to support MySQL and created a first stab at a decent SPARQL query engine.

I also quickly coded up a little RSS crawler to go out and crawl about 40 RSS feeds. Right now it does this on demand, but I’ll soon change to poll every X minutes. I’m using Danny Ayers’ and Henry Story’s AtomOWL schema to represent the RSS data in the triple store. Not sure I’ll stick with that, but it works for the time being.

With the triple store, a crawler and a query engine in place, I can finally start to do some of the higher level work like notification, user interfaces, workflow, etc. The next two weeks should see major progress made. Hopefully I’ll have something to show to people at LinkedDataPlanet and get some feedback.

Just for fun, here’s a screenshot of the SPARQL Shell that I’ve written to run test queries it. Probably not part of the product, but a must-have for development. Here I’m just querying my triple store for articles from CruchGear. Neato!

Until next time, stay classy inter-tubes.

For several years now, I’ve been kind of obsessed with the work being done to fulfill TimBL’s vision of a Semantic Web. Now, I don’t know that I’m ready to drink the whole Big Giant Graph Kool-aid yet, but I totally buy into the technology. RDF(s) and OWL are really wonderful things.

A few years back, I was working on a Semantic Web In a Box called ontogon. I made some pretty decent progress and had a usable little tool to store and related pretty much anything. But I got busy traveling and working so much that I kind of shelved it, let the domain expire, etc.

Some recent discussions with friends have re-invigorated my interest in this area. Specifically in relation to how applications based on semantic web technologies can bring value to the enterprise. In the “typical” enterprise setting, there is a shit-load (technical term) of data being produced by people and systems. Some research has led me to the belief that 1) finding that data is hard, 2) making sure it’s relevant is harder, and 3) linking it together is even harder still. This is just the kind of area that semantics is really good at tackling.

So my next project is going to be a solution to this problem. Quite a step up from copy2web in terms of complexity, features and price point, no? I’ll post more frequently on this as I make progress.

I bumped into Ian Landsman of HelpSpot fame on Twitter the other day. I offered a free copy2web license, and he was kind enough to provide some feedback. Based on his observations, I’ve got a new feature list for release 1.3.

• A Delete button to remove clips.
• An OS X style “quick-look” feature instead of the tool-tip preview.
• Simplified registration.
• Letting you give a name to any of your non-file clips.

Thanks Ian!

I’m still toying with the idea of selling the server-side component as well. But I’m really busy with work and other projects right now, so that might be put off until 1.4

Well, it’s a bit late (at least I’m consistent!), but copy2web 1.2 is now available! New features include:

• Files. You will be able to store a file as a clip (up to 2MB)
• Drag and Drop. Drag a file, image or text selection into the copy2web window. Note that what actually gets copied is browser dependent.
• Drag text and image clips out of copy2web and into another application.
• Drag files to the Finder, Explorer or desktop to save them to the local filesystem.
• Compression. Clips are now GZIP compressed for faster upload/download.
• Windows Task Tray. On Windows, minimize copy2web to the task tray.
• Progress indicator. For big clips, an infinite progress indicator will appear to mesmerize you whilst you wait.
• Support for Linux!

So, what’s next? I’m probably going to create purely HTML based version for those that love to live in their browser. It will probably be much more simplistic that the desktop version; no drag ‘n drop, for example.

Also I’ll probably add a facility to share your clips with your friends.

And, as always, I’m interested to hear what you features you might like, so please drop me a line!

After a few weeks doing “work” work, I’m back to making some updates to copy2web. The feature list I mentioned earlier have all been implemented, now I just have some testing to do.

If you’re a current user, you’ll get the update for free. Look for an email from me sometime this weekend!

I’m biting the bullet and providing a free 30-trial of copy2web. It’s the full-meal-deal…no crippleware, no nag-screens. I’ll just cut you off after 30 days (or whenever I get around to writing a script to manage that).

Feel free to grab a copy and play with it. If you have any problems or suggestions, please let me know!

Wake the kids! Phone the neighbors! copy2web is officially available for purchase. Yay!

Of course, this is just the beginning. Creating the product is only half the battle. Getting someone to actually part with their money is another issue all together. So what’s my plan here? Good question…

SEO, SEO, It’s Off to SEO I Go!

No one is going to find copy2web on their own and Google won’t put me on page one just because of my charming personality and rugged good looks. So I need to start optimizing the pages to get a higher page ranking. Bob’s got some info in his book, and there are some other resources out there that I might try.

AdWords

AdWords seem to be a pretty good way to get on the front page if you don’t have good SEO mojo. I’ve created an account and registered some key words and phrases: shared clipboard, distributed clipboard, web clipboard clipboard viewer, clipboard, etc. I’ve set up a limit of $3/day for this and it’s starting to generate some traffic. I’m hitting my $3 limit every day and seeing some click-throughs to my purchase page.

Pricing

The price of copy2web is currently $14.95. Why? Dunno. Seemed like a reasonable number. Especially if you’re paying in Euros. This might be a little on the high side, but we’ll see. Some experimentation will be needed here. For now, I’ll leave it alone as I’d rather lower prices later as opposed to raising them.

Watchful Waiting

For now I’m just going to leave things alone and track my analytics. Once I have a week or two of base-line data, then I’ll start tweaking and experimenting more to find out what visitors are doing.

So that’s all for now. Buy a copy will you? I have eighteen kids to feed! (not really)

I wanted to put up a screencast of copy2web, so I dropped a few bucks on nice screen capture program. Turns out, you might actually have to have talent to do this kind of thing. Who knew? Anyway, my first attempt is a big of a flop. No text overlays, no music, etc. But, whatever. It’s a start. I also need to figure out how to embed video here without totally breaking the layout of the page. For another day I guess…

Work continues on copy2web. I’ve given some early access releases to a few personal friends to get some feedback. So far, so good!. The server component has been running for a week, and seems stable. I’ve been tweaking the client UI quite a bit and haven’t managed to crash the server…so that’s good!

Speaking of the UI, here’s a screen shot. If the iChat and iPhone UIs had a drunken one-night-stand, the result might look something like this I think. The big white box with the SubEthaEdit logo in it is actually a popup preview of the image clip the mouse is hovering over. A fancy tool-tip really. I wanted to make something closer to what iCal shows when you double-click on an event, but this will do the trick I think.

The three buttons are paste, copy and reload. So you can use those or use the keyboard shortcuts for paste/copy ( ⌘-C, ⌘-V ) and reload ( ⌘-R )

A few more items to take care of tonight: 1) Fix the ugly activation screens and 2) Give you some way to change your account password (whoops!).

Better get to it…

Did I say seven days? Oh, eh. What I meant was 14 days. Uh. Heh.

I’m sad (and somewhat embarassed) to say that I won’t meet my self-imposed seven day deadline. There just weren’t enough hours in the day to get copy2web out the door in a week. While I’m fairly pleased with the progress I’ve made, the devil did in fact turn out to be in the details.

So what went wrong? I felt that I should have been able to knock this out without much trouble. In retrospect, I should have:

1. Started getting the commercial and business requirements set up right away. While I may be willing to work all night to get this project going, processors, lawyers and banks aren’t. Letting this sit for five days was a huge mistake. Even if I was ready to sell, I currently have no good way to accept payment. I could just do the PayPal thing into my personal checking account, but that seems like a bad idea.
2. Used a web site template right away. I burned a lot of time trying to find a template I liked. Nothing really caught my eye, so I decided to code my own. Mistake. I finally realized this and just picked a template that was ‘good enough’. A whole day was probably wasted on this alone.
3. Avoided scope creep. I was determined to create a very simple application. No bells or whistles of any sort. But of course, I started adding things that I didn’t need, and tweaking the design when I really didn’t need to. Spending an hour tweaking icons in Photoshop just so they look a tiny bit better was a wasted effort.
4. Taken some vacation time from my day job. The entire effort was done in the evenings or when I had a spare hour during the work day. In theory, I didn’t think this would be a problem. In practice, it was really difficult. After nine hours of hacking on something that I have no interest in, I tended to feel burned out and uninspired until late into the evening. By about 11pm I would start to get into a zone and really be productive until about 3am. But then the cursed morning came. A few nights like this and a few all-nighters really took a toll on my poor brain.

So while it’s disappointing to not meet my goal, it was actually quite a lot of fun. I haven’t pulled all nighters like that since I was a twenty-something. Also, I (re)learned some things about myself and how I work best, where my weaknesses are, and what distracts me from achieving what I want. It’s not the destination, it’s the journey. Right?

So what’s next for copy2web? Finishing. I’m giving myself another goal date of March 15^th. One more week. And if I miss that deadline, I’ll set another goal. And another. And another. And another…