I get this question a lot: “How much would it cost to make a web site like ‘XYZ Stuff!’, except with A, B and C?”

It’s not a bad question, and honestly, ask any one who’s built one or more sites before, and you’ll get a different answer from each. However, I just recently responded to one such question, and thought I’d share with you, in case you were wondering the same thing. It might not help or be applicable to your case, but just in case it is…enjoy =]:

Q: How much would it cost to build a site like [small-to-medium sized somewhat-custom web site]?

A: To answer your question, you could build what you need for free, with just a monthly hosting cost ($5-$50) to keep it running, using tools like Mambo, Drupal, or Joomla (a Google search should bring up lots of info on these). However, these free or low-cost solutions are pretty complicated and buggy to get running just the way you want them, so you always trade cost for comfort, pretty much. If you had someone build what you want it shouldn’t cost more than 5-10K to get the basics up and running, but you’ll be paying more every month to get small changes, bug fixes and new features. Another option is looking at higher-end services like Kick Apps, a Facebook community or a YouTube group to house what you want to do.

To be honest, there are a lot of easy options for an individual to post and share docs, videos, blogs and chats with everyone in the world – but they’re not very customizable. There are also lots of free tools for businesses to use to put together custom experiences (like the example given), but you have to be really technical and patient to figure them out.

Probably the most economical solution would be to find someone or a small web development group to set up a Joomla, Mambo or Drupal site like your example site has, then teach you how to keep it running. You might still pay $5-$10K for it, but you’re more likely to get something that will last longer for your needs than a custom-built web site would. I don’t think either of those 3 tools would have a problem hosting or storing videos for your combines.

As always, your mileage may vary, but I would be wary of anyone who promises to build an entire web experience from scratch for less than $1000, and especially wary of someone who promises you an exact duplication of a moderately successful, well-running web site for less than $20K. These numbers, of course, depend on what the site does and who does it, but honestly, would you spend 3 months of your life to make $500, or would you trust your business to a web site built in 8 hours?

Anyway, hope this is useful. If not, I’m always open to other opinions and perspectives =]

Bryan

Well this is really clever.  Neat example of natural language processing and design rolled together.  Will be neat when they have more objects to play with, but looking at what others have done is also pretty cool…WordsEye Login.

Monster Commute a free steampunk webcomic about traffic.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/02/14/the-death-of-web-20/ ]]> http://bjminihan.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/from-the-oh-finally-file/feed/ 0 bjminihan http://bjminihan.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/eight-more-reasons/ http://bjminihan.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/eight-more-reasons/#comments Sun, 15 Feb 2009 21:24:37 +0000 bjminihan http://bjminihan.wordpress.com/?p=87 ]]>

I’ve been noticing a few new things since I last quit smoking (this is, in fact, the 2nd time I’ve successfully quit for more than 2 hours or so…going on 2 weeks now, but who’s counting?).

Ask anyone who smokes (or knows someone who does) and they can spout off at least 5 really good reasons not to smoke.  They are all perfectly legitimate, and probably the top reasons any given smoker chooses to quit.  So for the sake of completeness, here are

The Five Biggies *:

1. It’ll hurt and kill ya (yeah, pretty much)
2. It’ll hurt or kill yer family and friends (well, tougher argument, but not exactly unproven either)
3. It’ll make ya taste/smell bad (no argument there)
4. It’ll make ya go broke (eventually…probably sooner, given trends in tax legislation)
5. It significantly increases the chance of death-by-fire-or-smoke-inhalation caused by falling asleep in bed with a lit cigarette (kind of number 1, still, but i thought it needed repeating)

Feel free to read the above using the voice of Santa Claus from A Christmas Story (e.g. “You’ll putchyer eye out!”).

Anyway, if the above 5 reasons aren’t enough for you – they do get a little tiresome after you’ve heard them enough and have trained your highly practiced rationalizing brain against them for several years – here are a few new ones.  These may just be particular to me.  I am (was) somewhat of a non-social, conscientious smoker.  It was a concentration-aid for me, first and foremost, and never really had much to do with being or looking cool (although, I predict it’s going to make a come-back if we slip into another global depression).  Anyway, on the off-chance any of these are applicable to you, hopefully you’ll find that one more extra reason to quit that you hadn’t thought of, before.  You just might be able to quit this time, and stay quit, for good.  Here ya go:

Eight More Reasons to Quit:

1. You get to complain about being sick again. When you smoke, you aren’t allowed to cough in public, or blow your nose, or sneeze, without someone telling you “that’s your body telling you to quit!”.  You usually grin and bear it.  People mean well.  But boy, if you don’t get sick that often, sometimes you just want to “be sick” and not “be someone whose body is telling him/her to quit something or other”.  Well, guess what?  Quit smoking and now you can bitch and moan all you want, just like normal people, at the slightest hic, the teensiest twitter, itch, pain or migraine.  The world of hypochondria is at your feet, and you are a ragweed pollen on its winds.  Enjoy!
2. You’ll probably get more contextually relevant healthcare (related to item 1).  I haven’t thoroughly tested this one yet, but I’m due for a checkup.  At any rate, I once went to the college infirmary because I twisted my ankle hiking.  After checking me in, weighing me, measuring my height and blood pressure, the Dr. came in to find out what was wrong.  First he asked me what happened.  Next he asked me if I could still walk on the ankle.  Third question was, “Do you smoke?”.  I’m not kidding.  Before recommending a (rather ineffective) solution for my ankle (wrap it up and don’t walk on it for 24 hours, if you’re curious), he gave me a ten minute lecture on how bad smoking was for me.  Now I don’t know about you, but this isn’t the fifties, where doctors made housecalls and you got a good hour and a half to chit-chat with the PHD about your quality of life.  You get – literally – FIFTEEN minutes, max, with a doctor these days.  So when you get up the gumption to actually go see the kind doctor, you would rather spend that time diagnosing, treating, and hopefully curing, the condition for which you scheduled your appointment.  Spending 2/3rds of my time telling me something I already know, and am not prepared to handle at that time, serves no one but your good deed for the day.
3. You can tackle all those other hygiene problems. This one’s kind of tricky and specific to your own condition.  Me, I don’t know how to judge whether I smell better or worse than I did before.  I’m told I smell better, so I believe people who tell me that.  No one really goes around telling people they smell bad, even if they smoke (well, smokers are actually told quite frequently that they smell bad).  So let’s just say for the sake of argument that when you quit, you DO smell better, and your halitosis improves, and you require less cologne and/or deodorant.  On the other hand…once you quit smoking you can no longer blame it for any such problems you had before.  For instance, my teeth were colored yellow by fluoride treatments that strengthened my teeth when I was 8 or 9 years old.  However, for most of my life folks have assumed my teeth are yellow from cigarettes.  Not sure what I’m going to tell them when they don’t turn white all-of-a-sudden, but I’ll figure out a way to correct that now – at least it’ll be worth it.
4. You don’t have to pick up other people’s garbage. Again, might just be me, but I don’t (unless I’m actually on fire) throw my cigarette butts on the ground.  I used to.  I think every few months I might, if I felt I was standing in a land fill.  But the past 5-8 years or so, I collected them either in my pockets or (more recently) in plastic bottles in the car, and threw them away when I got the chance, in a more proper receptacle.  I got to feel better that I wasn’t poisoning the earth with my own bad habit (well, at least not in a human-accessible place – don’t get me started on pollution).  So that was my own trash, but what about others?  Now, when I’m outside where fellow smokers tend to congregate, especially if it’s somewhere nice and I’d like to continue smoking there, I tend to pick up other people’s cigarette butts and throw them away.  The logic here is that if there are no butts on the ground, the management is less likely to outright ban smoking in that particular place, and hence, I can continue smoking there.  Make sense?  You’re right, doesn’t make much sense to me, either.  At any rate, I don’t have to do that anymore, although just because I don’t mind touching them so much, I’ll probably pick a few up every once in awhile, and throw them away.  Who else is gonna do it?
5. You can let other people set things on fire. Being the only smoker amongst friends puts you in the awkward position of having to light everything from candles, to bonfires.  I say awkward, because what usually follows one of these events is someone else’s child asking you or their parents why you are the only one who carries a lighter in his pocket.  That’s usually followed by a very brief, quiet, polite “because he smokes” comment.
6. You can solve problems requiring more than 50 minutes of concentration. I smoked roughly 1 to 1.5 packs a day.  That usually meant a cigarette every fifty minutes or so.  Because I typically smoked when I needed to break from one task and move to another, I learned to break all of my tasks down into fifty minutes or less.  That’s actually not a bad way to get really big problems solved.  On the other hand, it helps to spend a good 70 minutes on a problem, sometimes.
7. You have an extra pocket. Just like that.  Now I finally have a place to keep my phone!
8. You don’t have to make your friends follow you outside.  Hangin out with your friends or co-workers having a few beers or trying to solve a problem – you have to go outside once an hour to smoke.  Inevitably your good friends tend to go with you, to keep the conversation going.  Now, you can all save on that extra exercise and stay inside.

As for me, let’s hope I’m still smoke-free next week.  I think I’ll probably be out of the woods – and KNOW that I’ve quit – sometime around 2065 or so.

* I left off: Everything Will Taste/Smell better, and You’ll Breathe Better, because a) The first is not true for me, and b) I got a whopping flu a week after I quit and I haven’t breathed worse in 9 years.  Also, during my last 1.5 year non-smoking binge, I found absolutely no difference in my breathing quality.

I think my house has gremlins …or maybe critters.

Things keep breaking all over the place.  Old things.  New Things.  Complicated things.  Simple things.  Things that shouldn’t break.  Things that broke before, were fixed, and are now broken in a completely different place.

Broken crap.

All over the danged house.

What I hate the most…what *eats* at me…is that I can’t fix any of them.

I have a garage full of (mostly non-broken) tools – very expensive and well-cared-for ones, at that – yet all the king’s screwdrivers and all the king’s hammers cannot put humpty the dishwasher together again.

Here’s a very short list of the things that broke – all by themselves, look-ma-no-hands – in the past year:

• Dishwasher – those little plastic wheelie things keep falling off the racks after snapping in half
• Oven – The heating element burst into an awe-inspiring display of fireworks and melted right through itself.  I thought there was an arc-welder in my kitchen
• Lawn mower – The steel bolt that holds the left side of the handle on broke, so now it mows in circles
• Heater – Our 5 year old heat furnace blew a propeller.  No idea how or why, it just rusted right through.
• Garbage disposal – Started leaking.  Mind you – it’s the third one we’ve installed in 4 years
• Fire alarms – Every 2-5 months, on a random day of the week, half of them go off by themselves, mostly during naps, dinner, showers and other mostly inappropriate times.  Changed the batteries and vacuumed every six months.
• Refrigerator – Don’t get me started.  Plastic doohickies and thingamabobs fly off constantly.  The water dispenser stopped working for a month, soon after the whole cooling element was replaced.
• Washing machine – Recently started spouting water when we wash pillows
• Laptop – Compaq or HP.  One or the other.  It’s our fourth one, and died last month just like all the others – internal power supply is completely shot.
• Lawn Umbrellas x 2 – Fell over once and the spokes broke.  Whee.
• Vacuum Cleaner – The handle broke clean off.  Snapped right in two.  I swear I didn’t hit it, and I’m pretty sure all we did was *vacuum* with it.
• Stereo receiver – Volume now works backwards.  Clockwise turns it down, counter-clockwise turns it up.

Now, we don’t buy always buy the most expensive stuff – we tend to go middle of the road + a little more, most of the time.  Almost all of the above are name-brand products known (more or less) to be respectable.

What I would really hope (in my wildest dreams) is that some enterprising company (or companies) out there can figure out a way to market and sell products that last longer than 2-3 years.

Then again, maybe my expectations are too high.

Bleah.

Every single time you sit down to do something you haven’t done in awhile, it takes 2-3 hours to get everything situated just the right way again. I’m missing the Tekton font, and I have NO idea what I did with it.
 
*sigh* ]]> http://bjminihan.wordpress.com/2009/02/06/never-ceases-to-amaze-me/feed/ 0 bjminihan http://bjminihan.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/how-do-i-miss-thee/ http://bjminihan.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/how-do-i-miss-thee/#comments Wed, 04 Feb 2009 22:22:28 +0000 bjminihan http://bjminihan.wordpress.com/?p=69 ]]>

I finally quit smoking again the other day.  This time, I just did it completely cold.

No patch.

No gum.

No nuthin.

Saturday afternoon at 4:06 pm, I handed my wife all of my credit cards and cash and quietly said, “can you hang on to these for me, I’m out of smokes and I’m not getting any more.”  I haven’t smoked since.

Yeah, sounds pretty ballsy, right?

Seventy three minutes later, there are 73 carpenter bees crawling around inside my head, each of which is missing nicotine quite severely.

Those commercials showing people quitting and forgetting to do the most basic tasks are 100% accurate.  The one where the lady can’t figure out how to back out of her driveway – she keeps turning the wrong way to look over her shoulder, and takes out the neighbor’s trash cans – that’s my favorite.  It’s like that.

The first few days are the worst.

It’s not that you forget how to do simple things.  It’s like having someone follow you around, throwing tennis balls at you so incessantly that you can’t remember how to put one foot in front of the other.

The most difficult part about quitting smoking isn’t *not having a cigarette*.  The most difficult part is *not buying them*.  If you’re in a non-smoking environment, where no one else smokes or has cigarettes, and you have no way to immediately acquire a cigarette – it’s easy to stop.  You have no choice.

It’s so difficult to avoid buying cigarettes because even if they cost $30 a pack, you can always convince yourself that you’ll just have one and throw the pack away afterwards.  There is also no immediate or obvious consequence to buying a pack, other than the hit to your wallet.  Oh yeah…the wallet part, and of course the total sense of failure and disappointment.  But hey, who’s counting =].

If you care to know what it feels like, here’s the best analogy I can think of:

Using a single thread, voluntarily tie (with a slip knot) your left hand behind your back.  Then pay a few friends (or enemies) to throw tennis balls at you non-stop for three days.  Try to catch or deflect them all with one hand.

The analogy works because it’s ultimately up to you to keep your hand tied up, and excruciatingly tempting to give up on the whole thing after the fifth ball hits you in the neck.

At any rate, the bees aren’t so active today.  It’s been four full days now (or is it five?).  I’m feeling better and a little more “with it”, and I’m really happy my family is happier about the whole thing.

It’s worth it, just for those smiles.  “I’d rather have grumpy than smoky, Daddy” – that’s what my daughter says.

Bring on the tennis balls…keep em comin’.  Feel like Bonnie Franklin singin ‘One Day at a Time’…