On the 1st March (next Thursday, as I write this), I’m planning to do a mini re-launch of Vagueware.com and with a new website comes a new business model.

I will be phasing things in over the next 6-8 weeks. First, the “open innovation” phase, where ideas are thrown around, submitted and developed by anybody with an interest. Then the time to turn some of those ideas into real open source code, so anybody and everybody can develop the ideas further. And of course, run useful software. Finally a services model to make all your Rails deployment nightmares go away, and to bring some cashflow around those open source tools - support, maintenance, bespoke customisation will feature as well as hosted SaaS solutions.

However, I have a conundrum.

I’m busy finishing up work elsewhere right now. I have some todo items on older projects to close, and I am also involved in a second company completely unrelated to Vagueware that desperately needs some of my coding love right now. Time between now and next Thursday is tight. And the code base for the next version of Vagueware.com? Well, to be honest, barely started.

Right now, I need the splash page, and the ability for users to create accounts, edit wiki pages, for me to be able to structure some CMS around it all, add some forums, etc. It’s not a huge job, but to code it up from scratch even with the existing plugins out there might take longer than a week given other pulls on my time. It’s obvious that given the focus on it being a Ruby/Rails led set of projects, the time should be taken to develop the site itself in Rails.

There is an alternative though. Use something else other than Rails for now. Drupal does nearly everything I need and I could configure it all up this weekend ready to go. But it’s PHP. And that feels like a lie to me, and a lie to the other people I want to involve in this.

I could go meta and suggest that the first project is a tool to replace the site in Rails that would then allow Vagueware to become self-hosting. At least then the ideas would get started, and providing I was able to export everything from the inter-rim site when the job was done, nothing would be lost. It would allow those people who want to show up on day one to be involved in developing a community tool useful to them, and even have an input into how projects should be handled in the future. It could be an advantage.

It still feels like a major hack though. Anybody have any other ideas? I could delay the launch by another couple of weeks, but I’m keen to get started ASAP.