Been wanting to post some more here without too much luck. Giving it another try. Warning: no proof reading or anything, just unedited ramblings ahead.

I am just finishing up my second big project for my new business. It has been a very slow process to get the whole thing (the business) off the ground, but that is mostly because I am having to learn so many new things. None of it is particularly hard, per se, it's just having to pay attention to everything at the same time. I'm not used to that. Being the only employee is great, and maybe the only way I can work happily, but the downside is just that I end up doing everything, and to put it mildly, I'm not good at everything.

It would probably be more efficient for me to work for another company that is run by people who, you know, actually know how to run a company. But that doesn't seem as fun. So I'm struggling along by myself, probably making a lot of stupid mistakes, and probably spending too much time reinventing wheels. But at least they are my mistakes and my wheels.

Building websites is pretty easy. Building websites that can be maintained and extended through time is more difficult. And building many websites that can be maintained and extended by just one person is even more difficult. This is where almost all my thinking goes.

Standardization is the key. I have spent a lot of time building the tools that will let me build websites. I could probably just code each site by hand in less time than it is taking me to develop an automated approach, but the problem is that once you have dozens of sites built, if they are all running on different code you have hacked together it is a nightmare to maintain. So what I've been aiming at is having just one very flexible code base that runs all the sites, and then as upgrades and bug fixes are made to that code they are automatically rolled out to all the sites.

And I've done pretty well with this. The setup is actually pretty extreme. Here's the quick technical rundown: