Forums and Surveys

I recently settled on a solution for my needs to have both some sort of online discussion forums, and the ability to conduct automated surveys and polls. In each area there were many choices, including a variety of bad pre-existing applications, and the option of writing my own functionality, which is pretty much always an option. I love making software but if I can reduce the amount of work I have to do, and the cost is small (or free, ideally), I'll seriously consider a pre-existing tool. Also I'd like to have as much traffic as I can be served by somebody else's site, somebody else's servers. Keeps my architectural burden smaller, and potentially my monthly hosting costs smaller too.

Google Groups for forums. There appeared to be several somewhat equally good choices out there, but I had a slight bias to Google because I like their style and UI philosophy, and they're somewhat more of a known quantity for me.

FormSite.com for surveys, polls or miscellaneous forms. I saw many bad or blah tools out there, but this one really jumped out as having a nice balance of qualities. And the price was ideal. They have a free (zero price) tier, with very small service limits, but it lets you try it out for basically as long as you want, and it's easy to upgrade to higher, paid tiers. And they're next higher tier (the lowest paid one) is only about $10/month. And the service limits for that tier (expressed in terms of the maximum number of forms, form items, and stored results) are just high enough that it might easily be sufficient for a year or so. We'll see. Most of the other solutions I evaluated were either too expensive, too stupid, had a bad UI, had too few features, or had too steep a learning curve. I also got a good "smart" vibe from their site, a feeling like it's being run by somebody smart, lurking behind the scenes somewhere. Which is reassuring. Because I don't always get that feeling from some companies and some sites. We'll see. Good experience with them so far, anyway.

I could very easily be wrong about each of these choices -- maybe they have some showstopper problem or aspect to them and I just haven't seen it yet. Or maybe there's some super awesome and superior alternative to each out there, and I just didn't hear about them. That's possible. I didn't conduct an exhaustive study.

Genghis Con vs PyCon: Who Would Win?

Personally I think Star Trek's Khan would kick both their asses, but that's just me.

I'm arranging to distribute flyers promoting my launch game at the upcoming Genghis Con convention in Denver. The flyer will describe the game a bit and invite interested folks to check it out and hopefully become a Beta-tester. Though the convention is focused on "meatspace" games (board games, wargames, miniatures, RPG's, card games) it attracts the kind of person whose attention, feedback, and (ideally) business I'd like to get. Eventually. Maybe. Like that one time. At a band camp.

PyCon 2008 will be hosted in Chicago this year and since I live in Chicago I'm considering whether I can somehow take advantage of this curious alignment of the planets in such a way that it promotes my company and launch game. The only legitimate angle I have, I think, is that I'm a major Python fan and my startup is, at least currently, a Python-centric dev shop, with the bulk of our site and launch game written in Python. Even that interesting fact may not warrant a presence there, but I plan to seek out contributors and collaborators in the future, and the ability to submit original code or game content written in Python would very likely be a requirement. Our software will not be cobbled together from 8 different languages, held together with duct tape (Perl? Python?), thank you very much, at least if I can help it. Better if we are mono-linguistic. Better for my brain, anyway.

But anyway... it's probably too late to become an official exhibitor at either con (and frankly, I don't know if I want or am able to be such a thing at this stage) but it's not too late or too hard to prepare flyers or other promotional material.

Company Name Unveiling: ZodLogic

For most of the life of the project to create this new computer game company I've used the name Groglogic, at least in private, to refer it. But at some point I decided I should change the name to something with more zing and less potential conflict with other usages out there on the net. The name I ultimately chose is ZodLogic.

I like it because it has a similar feel and spirit as Groglogic with several advantages over it. It's a little bit shorter. It's more alpha-sort friendly (will often appear at the end of any alphabetically-sorted list of words, so it's more likely to stand out). It Googles more "cleanly" (meaning, less overlap with other potential usages on the net.) It still has the word "logic" in it, which I wanted to retain because it suggests a software company, and my desire to have (start, run, work for) an intelligent company, not some mindless idiotic corporate religious paradigm/rule-bound bureaucratic shallow ass-kissing soul-destroying insane crapfest that passes for some companies out there. And "zod" sounds cool. And reminds me of a certain cool character from a certain cool superhero movie a long time ago.

In step with this change, I've changed this blog's name to ZodLogic Diary.

Mike

Vacation

I've been on vacation the last few weeks so not much progress has been made on the company.
In a week I should return to doing it full-time and hope to start an invite-only Beta soon thereafter.

Mike