GoDaddy Windows + Wordpress won't work

This was a painful lesson.

1. Talked to GoDaddy and they say you can use WordPress w/ Windows account
2. Download was easy, setup was easy, and I could write new posts to the blog and create new pages.
3. Tried to change the configuration and that's where it fell apart.

I used K2, Tarski and the default Kubrick themes to test out if I could change options and none of them seemed to work. A few days of debugging showed that some of the options were not created in MySQL! Some more research showed just a slew of weird behavior :-(

Called GoDaddy again and they said "we don't support WordPress on Windows accounts!" Well, I sure wish they had told me that before I debugged PHP and the various themes!

So, DotNetNuke that will support the non-profit organization's web site. It actually downloaded easily and I was able to quickly create a site leveraging several different modules!

Yeah, I know - most of you are saying GoDaddy? Windows? Why didn't you use the LAMP stack that you know so well. I said non-profit organization, right? And, we have a custom ASP app that locked us into Windows.

KnowNow's secret sauce

I was contemplating what was so special about KnowNow and I came up w/ two features that encapsulate it all:

Dynamic creation of topics while enforcing permissions

The event router allowed you to create any topic and posts messages to them. And, anyone with the permissions could consume those messages. For e.g. let's say you run a web site and want to allow users on the web site to chat w/ each other - gmail supports this! How do you allow two users , say Fred & George, to start chatting with each other?

• Your back end systems need to create a secure channel where just the two of them can communicate and others cannot snoop, or even know of this conversation. How would you do this in JMS?
• What if Fred wants invite Harry into the conversation? Now, Fred needs to give permission to Harry to be able to read and write from that channel.

Imagine hundreds of such conversations and you run into problems with database storage, and near real time delivery. How does the server 'push' the information out?

Real time delivery to the browser

OK, so RIA is prevalent now. Well, it wasn't 7 years ago, I guess I would say it wasn't 4 years ago. Rohit & Adam's vision did come to reality!

Point is that with Comet and Ajax we now have browser apps that come close to rivaling fat applications on the desktop. Google docs is a great example! But, KnowNow could have given you that ability back in 2002! For your own applications on your web site!

I wonder if others out there (ex-KN, customers, or partners) think that some other features were unique???

It was a blast while it lasted!

KnowNow - Gone Now

The patent that was pending for years was finally issued on May 27th, 2008. How ironic!

Multitasking. Hmm... Not quite

I never had a problem w/ having several projects that needed attention. Just couldn't work on them in parallel. I had to take 'em one at a time. Don't get me wrong. Managing several projects is OK but you can only work on one project/task at any given moment.

I felt guilty being 'out of pocket' for a few hours so that I could complete something. Well, thank you Bill Koch! This article at PSJ is reassuring!

Havasupai

Go on the net and look for Havasupai and you will find tonnes of pictures of the falls.



A 7 mile hike into the village and then another mile or so to the camp site (no bathrooms). Of course, you can elect to stay at the lodge in the village and enjoy a warm bath after a hard days hikng and swimming in the gorgeous pool!

In the early days we would talk about KnowNow and every one would associate us w/ Tibco and Sonic. We would also get lumped with the stock ticker data delivery engines. Yes, we did have quite a few traders use the product through Excel, in dynamically updated web base dashboards and in reverse auction environments as well.

But, I do believe that the Enterprise Syndication Solution (ESS) actually does bring the right application to market.

I associate this application with fantasy football and apartment hunting in San Francisco. Of course, we have the sport sites (ESPN.com, FOXSports.com, FFToday.com, and other similar sites) to cater to the needs to the serious fantasy players. And, yes, craigslist does a great job of giving you the list of aprtments in your neighbourhood.

But, what do you do when you want to look for specific keywords within those data sources? Why should you have to scan the news of 10 sites to ensure that your player will play and is not injured! Why should you wait for an email to alert you that the apartment in your desired area is available? If your attention span is really the commodity, then aren't you wasting it.

Refreshing the web page, the RSS reader, and your mail client will distract you more drastically than one may anticipate. What if you were presented with an update when your specific keywords should up in the information stream. It is the information stream that you are monitoring - a highway of data that you want to monitor with your specific criteria.

ESS delivers this. If you can install Yahoo Messenger, then you can install ESS Deskbar - a utility that presents toasts as articles meeting your criteria show up in the information source! Yes, it grabs your attention when a toast shows up but isn't that exactly when it should?? Check out the first gen Deskbar and let me know what you think.

JotSpot

I had the privilige of meeting the JotSpot team recently. What a refreshing experience to see an early stage startup and the energy as the team embarks on the "Change the world" journey.

Well, I actually think this one will. The guys are motivated and the product continues to evolve at a rapid pace.

I can start using the blog app to exchange information within my company and the knowledgebase/forums are used by JotSpot themselves! What a way to jumpstart my support group! And, it is a viral app, right. You enable workgroups to get productive, small startups start using it and all of a sudden the corporation needs it!

This is one of a handful of tech companies that I will be watching over the next few years!