Coming Back Up for Air

It's been a busy and remarkably productive month.

I spent the first two weeks sprinting to the finish line preparing to deliver a tutorial, Playing in the Clouds, at the Cascadia IT Conference. That went well.

Then I had to attend to a few items that I had ignored for those two weeks:

• steering toward the next milestone of a WordPress site I am helping to build


• preparing to lead a troubleshooting/brainstorming workshop, WordPress Round Table, for WordPress site owners


• writing profiles of Makers (creative folks making cool things in their spare time) that use Google's Makerspace in Seattle.

The last two items had deadlines yesterday, and came off without a hitch. The first item is on schedule for its progress status and planning meeting next week.

Oh, yeah. Then there is my day job: tech support for Google Cloud Platform. That is going pretty well, too.

But today, I'm taking a break.

I slept in until 6am, and it felt luxurious. I spent a full hour at the gym instead of trying to squeeze 30 minutes of workout into 20 minutes. And, later today, I'm taking the family on a weekend adventure: Emerald City Comicon.

Gelling for the Future

Some things are starting to gel in the back of my mind, too. I've been thinking about starting a side business, but I have not yet nailed down what form it will take or what its unique value proposition will be. In last night's WordPress Round Table, there was a recurring theme of "I want to focus on my site's content, not its technology and infrastructure; but I can't afford to hire a developer just to maintain my site." That recurring theme suggests to me that their may be an underserved market for economical webmaster services.

I don't want to provide the webmaster services myself, but what if I could build a branded marketplace that brought WordPress site owners and technology service providers together? I see possibilities for:

• webmasters, who primarily ensure that the site is up and the software is up to date, plus they can offer occasional consulting and guidance on how to implement a new feature


• designers, who build (or rebuild) entire sites, or simply tweak existing sites a little more than a webmaster might be prepared to do


• webapp engineers, who would specialize in various technologies, like WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, and Django, plus specialize in various hosting environments, from AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenStack, Dreamhost, and Bluehost; they would also special by such things as programming language and database support.

These technology service providers would not have operate in the United States. This marketplace would be ripe for connecting site owners from and country, such as the U.S., with service providers from any country, such India.

This Technology Services Marketplace (or TSM, for lack of a better working title) could charge a fee for each "conversion event", in which a customer contacts a provider, regardless of whether that contact resulted in a sale. TSM could vet each service provider to qualify them, but it would be up to their customers to give them a performance score. Other value-added services might include videoconferencing (primarily for consultations), billing and payment, skills development opportunities, and reselling business apps and services aimed at small entrepreneurs.

Think of it as "Angie's List for Techies".

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Yes, it's been a great month, but my blogging has suffered. I've gotta get back on track.