Last week, we have released a new admin panel theme from themio. This new theme, “Utopia” comes packed with lots of beautifully crafted UI elements and it is built on top of popular twitter bootstrap framework. So you will be getting all the features of twitter bootstrap plus the extras.
Utopia comes with two themes white and dark which will suit your need in different situations. The collapsible sidebar and widgets, data tables, conversations tables, pricing tables and numbers of galleries with image effect will make it a perfect choice for the backend of your web applications
Screenshots
Dashoboard comes with a glimpse of beautifully crafted UI elements that comes with Utopia. The collapsible and
responsive
sidebar, data tables, legends, weather controls, data tables, news feed ticker and many more
I’ve seen many people asking me how to start a startup. Some even asking “should I start one?”, and some more you should not ask to anyone, like “How do I know that I am ready for starting my own startup”. I try to help them as much as I can with my limited experience I had so far in last 6-7 years, specially from one of the third world countries like Bangladesh. In this article I will try to summarize my experience and I hope that it will help to to make your own decision.
One important thing before starting a startup is that you really need to be a good team player. Usually there are very few “one man only” style startups. If you want one of that type, dont worry, team work is not something until you start looking for VC funding or until having a couple of marketing guys in your team. But keeping in mind that most statups have two or three members, I want to emphasize that team work is really very important thing. You need to be well communicative with your team members, show them respect to their decision and you need to be similar minded. You can’t really start a startup on helping girls to get their kithecn recipes out of the box while your team members want to make one for car lovers. So this is very important that despite of your personal feelings and interest, you must be a good team focusing on one single subject.
Secondly, not really a rocket science but kinda tough, you need an idea. You need a good idea that actually solves other peoples problem. When we started Leevio, our first target was to increase our brand value by making a product that people will actually use. Most of the people I see around, desperately looking to start their startup, are lacking one good idea, but where to get one? Listen, you dont need to spend weeks after weeks and months after months to get a good idea. You dont need a “better” idea from the beginning. Just look at peoples hanging beside you, see how they are doing annoying and repeating tasks in not-such-an-easy way. Try to simplify their everyday life. Think from their perspective and soon you will find that an idea is not such hard to find. So dont waste time, get a good idea that will help people to simplify some of their everyday tasks and boom, go. Gradually you can improve your idea and maybe you can scrap if you get a better one. But too much scrap and start game is bad for your startup. Whatever you get, start with that.
Another important thing in running a startup is that you must keep your ego aside. Thats why I said that you need similar minded people in your team which actually help your team leaning towards the same target. If your team members keep brawling about decisions every now and then, well, good luck with your startup that is never-to-see-the-light. Distribute the roles wisely. In a startup you will be suffering from limited money, limited resources and guess what, you have to run along with that. So be very wise in hiring for your team members. Hire some people that can do whatever they are good at, really well. And in a startup world, its not unexpected that you all have to do multi tasking. So sometime we get people who are good at HTML as well as in Photoshop, or one DBA who has moderately good skill in system administration. From my point, you really need these three types of people in your team
An architect, who can layout the project plan better
A DBA or someone who understands Database really well. Doesnt matter if it’s N/RDBMS or whatever
Designer, at least someone who can design in XHTML
System admin
Developers who will write the code together
While setting up Leevio, One of us had to play the role of architect and system admin. We together played quite a good role as laying out our DB schema. And then, we distributed our tasks into small parts and started coding. We didnt have a designer in our time. So sometime we outsourced some tasks, and sometime, surprisingly and luckily one of us was good in designing in XHTML and we did some basic ground work with his limited skill.
For today, I will try to end this article focusing on one more important thing. Tell me what is that? Furniture? nope! You are now motivated enough to start even getting a mattress and a decent laptop. Food? nope! who cares if you are even eating or not. Well, I’m just kidding and it’s really important that you always consume healthy foods.
The thing I want to mention here is “Money“. You, no matter if it’s an one man startup or three, need money to run it. You need some savings to run for couple of months. It’s not bad to plan for six months ahead of time so that you can pay your team. And it’s very rare that your startup will help you earning immediately after launch. So backup money is really helpful for these early days. When you start looking for seed money or angel funding, go to your friends and relatives first. Because those are the people who trust you and expect least than a commercial VC. Dont take money unless you really need that and whats more important is be wise in spending that. You dont need a dual quad core xeon server from the first day when your sartup is in incubator. You dont need Aeron Chairs. So try to spend as little as possible and always prepare for the bad days ahead. There’s nothing bad in being prepared. And keep a little saving so that you can restart even if your startup fails.
Thats all for now. I will come back with more articles regarding this very soon and I hope those will really help.
MiproappsβThe newest service around, Miproapps allows users to design a fan page by simply dragging & dropping elements to the center of the page. I found it to be one of the best services Iβve tried so far because it really is very easy to use, and it only took me a few minutes to create an interactive fan page.
A chart on that page will help you to quickly understand how each of these services differ from others. I am sad that MiproApps missed a quick point on “Custom Tab” which actually is there in MiproApps, just the process is not automated. It is possible only by request. All you have to do is open a support ticket and our engineers will take action as soon as they are in office.
We are working on this issue to make this process fully automated.
Facebook is changing all their page width to 520 px from 760px, effective from today. So if you haven’t worked on your page, it is your chance to get your hands dirty π
Note: MiproApps is developed using PHP on top of Zend Framework, Memcache and External web services. Right now we are providing a whooping collection of 35 widgets in total, which you can add instantly on your facebook fanpage and they will work from your pages without any problem. The drag-n-drop style designer will make your job even easier π
Supported Widgets (categorized):
1. Static Content category Static Images, Static Text, Link Builder and Contact-us form
2. Blogs category Posterous, WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger
3. Status Services category Tiwtter and Google Buzz
4. Video category Youtube, Vimeo, UStream, Any external video in flv format
5. Photo sharing category Flickr and Picasa
6. File sharing category Box.net
7. Audio category Last.fm and any externally uploaded mp3 audio
8. Facebook tools category Comments, LiveStream and Invite-Friends
9. Bookmark services category Digg, Delicious, Stumbleupon, Reddit and Technorati
10. Miscellaneous category Paypal Donation, Google Maps, External flash file, RSS feeds, IFrame, Poll, Image Slider (carousel) and SlideShare
Hope you will enjoy MiproApps, a nice application developed using Zend Framework :). MiproApps has been brought to you by my small startup Leevio
It started in a funny way rather than a typical project plan, and finally turned into an important project for us in Leevio. Everyone in our team was so much excited to release our first flagship product, a web based service (mashup you can say) we called MiproApps. It is a visual designing tool for Facebook fanpages.
MiproApps
Facebook fanpages are popular media to publish your company information, portfolio or upcoming events on Facebook. To make your product outreach a massive amount of users, it is a popular tool that works good. While creating our fanpage for Leevio, we found that we are limited by available applications to decorate and present a page “really” well. What we could do is design our page in an ordinary way, like writing FBML tags and and embed those in a tab. Or we could develop an application and embed it’s tab to another tab on our page. Which one did we go with? NONE!
We thought that it would be really interesting if we can develop a service (some sort of a visual designer for such pages) by which everyone (anyone, seriously) can design and decorate their fanpage with some data they really want to deliver to their audience. So we did a quick meeting to find out if it was really possible by us, and the challenges we found are the followings
1. Limited canvas size,
2. Works with different data sources
3. Drag and drop friendly, with proper layering.
4. Compatible with major browsers (Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera and Chrome)
5. Proper caching and storing widget data
We decided to develop this project in a “release early, release often” fashion. We didnt want to deliver a HUGE giant bloated with too many widgets and services after working for tons of hours. Instead we wanted to deliver a working barebone skeleton for our users which performs it’s job pretty well, and then to add feature s gradually in a regular interval. It would also help us to decide quickly how users are reacting with our project.
We four developers worked really hard for next couple of weeks to make it work, in short sprints and milestones. And now it is available for your use – you can check it out at http://miproapps.com. There are more than 25 pretty useful widgets to help you designing your fanpage impressively. We’ve also added tutorials and screencasts for you. Lets see how did we work with all our challenges.
MiproApps Design Canvas
1. Limited Canvas Size
To make sure users still be able to design his page easily, we keep three pre defined size for each widgets. Width of these three sizes are designed in such a way so that anyone can design multi-column page, easily.
2. Works with different data sources.
The core of MiproApps are external data sources and a very well designed parser to parse those data source in an unified way. Guess what, most of these data source are ready to be pulled out. Almost all of them offers valid RSS/Atom feeds. And that saved us HUGE (GIGANTIC cud be more appropriate) amount of work to do by ourselves. We just collect username for each of these data sources (like twitter, youtube) and then we pulled out feeds for that specific user. Everything is about public data, and that also saved us from some pain about treating private and sensitive information. Except one widget (I will come to that later) we just asked for plain username from users. And for twitter, we had to deal with oath based authentication system so that we can pull out user’s timeline using their token. These tokens are for read-only access to be more trusted by our users. We set a caching time of 10 minutes so that we have to call only 6 times max for an user in an hour. Do you kno what is the current rate limit per user per hour in Twitter? it’s only 75!
Configuration Editor
3. Drag and drop friendliness
We choose jQuery UI as we are very good at jQuery. And I must confess, that was a very good decision indeed. The excellent support of managing draggable and droppable components in jQuery UI made our life really easier. The only thing we found tricky was to persist the draggable state of each component on “Design Canvas”. But anyway, it was done very effectively and is working really great. You should check this out at http://miproapps.com
And oh, by the way, the z-index layering was quite a UI challenge for us. On a Facebook page canvas area, the internal Facebook components has maximum z-ndex of “101”. So we had to deal with that to keep our components z-index lower than that, to avoid an overlay over any internal Facebook item (a dialog box, for example, or the notification dropdown π )
4. Compatible with major browsers
Oh boy, we were doomed in hell with a monster called IE and that really made our day terrible every minute!. However, we tamed the beast quite good and now it works well with MiproApps. Another friendly monster betrayed us at last minute, has a name “Chrome”. we are working on that subtle UI issues and hope to deliver some updates pretty soon.
5. Proper caching and storing user data
Now that was a major challenge we dealt with. Each user can use hundreds of widgets, which colt actually pull data from hundreds of different data sources out there. So caching is a very important step we’d taken care of from the first day. We used Memcached. And we designed the architecture to cache data from every widget separately, not as a page in a whole. And it was challenging to deal with failsafe condition (you remember twitter’s fail whale, right?). Some widgets needed to be dealt with extra care for the caching technology of Facebook itself. But in overall it was a good architecture and worked impressively well. We are proud of it!
Useful set of widgets
Lets have a look at the tools, libraries and services we use for MiproApps
1. Subversion, definitely a life saver version controlling system.
2. Springloops as a subversion repository and deploy manager. It’s deploy manager is really awesome!
3. Lighthouse for Issue Tracking
4. Netbeans as our IDE, Mac OSX and Ubuntu as development OS. PHP and ZendFramework. For oAuth, we used PECL oAuth library. Memcached was used for caching.
5. jQuery and jQuery UI. The image slider you see on the front page was done using the brilliant Coin Slider.
6. Screencast was recorded by Screenium. Tutorial screenshots were taken using Jing.
7. Icons came from MediaLoot and legendary Silk by Famfamfam.
So that’s It – have a look at MiproApps at http://miproapps.com. Currently the application is in beta mode (all plans are free during beta – beside that, there will always be a free plan for everyone) and we are adding exciting widgets everyday. Hope you will like it.
