State Of The Munion '06

Hi ho everybody! Time for the semi-annual-ish State of the Munion address.

So where are we today?

Well, last month was - you might have noticed - something of a disaster. We were hit by repeated denial-of-service attacks initiated (we believe) by Turkish Islamists annoyed with the Jawa Report. Between the attacks and the steps I had to take to minimise the attacks, we encountered more than our fair share of difficulties, and CPanel is still something of a nervous wreck. I'll be cleaning up CPanel over the next few days, now that everything else is out of the way.

The next few months, on the other hand, are looking a whole lot brighter.

Minx is here. It's not a full blogging solution yet, but it will be, very soon. The reason for the sudden burst of progress is simple: I am being paid to write it.

For a while now I've been wondering how (or even if) I could make mu.nu pay without destroying its character. Running blogads would probably bring enough revenue to pay for the servers, but not really make any return on my time. Which is fine; I enjoy running mu.nu. But if there were a way to make enough money so that I could spend all my time on mu.nu, that would be extra cool.

And it looks like I've found something close to that. mu.nu doesn't have to change; we'll have new, best-of-breed software to run it on; and I get paid to write that software.

The secret is, there's going to be a new site coming along, and it's going to be a whole lot bigger than mu.nu. Different, in that anyone will be able to sign up for it, which is both better and worse. Different too in that it will be a commercial operation, and I won't have final say in everything that happens (though I'll have a lot of influence).

What will happen is that all the software that is developed for the new site will come to mu.nu first. You, my loyal band of guinea-pigs, will get first crack at all the goodies - and there are a lot of goodies planned.

During July and August I will be rolling out daily updates for Minx. I will be demonstrating it to the money guys in a couple of weeks, so I'm aiming to make it a fully-functional - albeit spartan - blogging system by then. And after that, start icing the cake.

We're aiming for a soft-launch of the new site in September, and I plan to do that via mu.nu. To steal an idea from Google, every Munuvian will be given five invitations to hand out, for free accounts on the new site. September and October will be the shakedown phase for the new site, with a full launch planned for November.

To summarise this, we have:

mu.nu

Pixy Misa, publisher
non-profit / non-revenue
unlimited access to all features
unlimited disk space and bandwidth
invitation-only

New Site

Pixy Misa, technical manager
final decision on non-technical matters lies with the folk paying for it
for-profit - advertising supported / paid accounts
limited access to features / disk space / bandwidth based on your account level
by invitation in startup phase, moving to fully open within a few months

I hope to start adding new blogs at mu.nu again soon, but Minx and the new site will be taking up almost all my time for the rest of the year. However, once we have Minx running at both locations, it will become much easier to add new blogs here.

We have world domination scheduled for 2009. I think we're on target.

P.S. I can't tell you the name of the new site yet, but you'll know it when you see it. If you see something new, and think Could that be it? then that's not it. When you see it, you'll say Yep, that's Pixy.

Trust me on this. ;)

Posted by Pixy Misa at July 5, 2006 02:49 AM | TrackBack