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**thruska** · 01-04-2011, 08:00 AM

Everyone makes New Year's resolutions and then starts off on the right foot but then life happens and those resolutions go by the wayside.

My plan for this year starts off with a dose of press releases about WebCron Site Backup. I've actually been slacking on that because, well, there's that whole "I've been developing software for a solid year and need a serious break" plus press releases during December about new stuff easily gets lost among the various celebrations with friends and family. I was also debating waiting the announcement since both WebCron and the module are both RCs. However, I realized that those two products are stable and the only reason it is RC is because there isn't a restore module. Yet.

After that, I want to take a hiatus from pure Barebones CMS and related product development to do a little of what the industry calls "eating my own dogfood". So I'll be off to do a little website design and development for a month or two and using Barebones CMS and my other products.

One of the top things on my to-do list after that is what I call "Critical Release 1" where I want to strengthen areas I've found to be weak in Barebones CMS and fix the minor bugs I've encountered. An example of a weakness: Ever since running performance metrics on Barebones CMS, I've been intrigued that PHP content serves up slightly faster than plain HTML but the CMS is three times slower at serving up pages from the cache than plain HTML. I was initially thinking the regular expression string replacement had something to do with it but, while developing WebCron Site Backup, I saw a couple other possibilities I need to explore as well. I'm thinking it is possible to make the caching system significantly faster than it is now. While I'm developing the new website, I'll be running performance tests and evaluating Barebones CMS. So it won't be as if I'm not doing anything.

That's roughly the first quarter of this year.

**thruska** · 01-08-2011, 09:39 AM

My "Press Release RAMPAGE!!!" for WebCron Site Backup is complete. I've found press releases are a pretty easy way to get visibility. I've discovered that the important thing to remember is ignore the upgrades that cost $$$ and go the free route on as many sites that offer a "free option". Press releases are no fun the first time around because it requires setting up a million different accounts and formulating a press release is hard work. After that, though, as long as it is news worthy, writing a press release is easy enough to do.

**thruska** · 01-10-2011, 06:39 PM

Got a voicemail from a media outlet today saying they may want to interview me about my "recent press release" (i.e. probably about WebCron Site Backup but it was rather vague). Their connections seem to be fairly impressive with some mainstream media in the mix. The interview is probably to see how nerdy I am and whether I can connect with ordinary folks to tell them about a product they've never heard nor thought of. I'll admit that I'm a serious nerd. I mean, I authored two insane software products in the past year and then documented both of them...extensively. So, no doubt there about my nerdiness.

**thruska** · 01-14-2011, 07:40 AM

Well, the mainstream media thing fell through. I kind of expected as much. Just one guy running a small business is never an interesting story. Open source software makes it an even less interesting story.

**thruska** · 04-17-2011, 10:25 PM

Alright. The first quarter is over and I've got nothing to show for it at the moment. I'm working as fast as possible on development but I overestimated what I can get done. Part of the delay is stemming from the fact that I've gone down a couple development rabbit trails and scope creep cycles but I've nipped those problems in the bud and development is now steamrolling along. I still don't have a completion timeline. I tend to operate on a "when it gets done" release schedule. I personally aim for certain release dates so that I'm always moving forward on projects.

On the upside, one of the projects I was planning on eventually developing for Barebones CMS is now very close to the front burner for real use in a production environment.

**thruska** · 05-05-2011, 07:01 AM

Alright, I'm now temporarily back to Barebones CMS development. My current plan is to upgrade all the third-party stuff, verify I didn't break anything too badly, release a new version, develop and release a brand new downloadable product, and then disappear for a bit while I finish off some major development. What this means for you is that Barebones CMS sees some action again.

**thruska** · 05-06-2011, 01:26 AM

Oh wow. The Content Editor (WYMEditor) is badly broken in IE9. Goes to show how often I use IE. Smile

**thruska** · 07-04-2011, 10:57 AM

Quick update: I've been working hard on v1.1. My primary goal at the moment is to integrate ACE (ACE = Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor) and have it show up if the browser supports it, with a clean fallback to EditArea. I'm getting there and it is finally shaping up and already looks and feels really slick. I've got a handful of bugs to work out yet. Okay, disappearing again.

**thruska** · 07-09-2011, 05:06 PM

Another quick update: GAH!!!!!!! ACE is making me lose hair!

**thruska** · 07-20-2011, 08:32 AM

Okay, ACE integration is about complete. I had to take a hiatus from it for a few days to regain some sanity, so I worked on a few other 1.1 related features and fixes. 1.1 is coming along nicely.