Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Roger's journal entry: Watch a video tour of Gallery Server Pro
Most of you know that my career revolves around a piece of software I created called Gallery Server Pro, but you probably don't know that much about it. You may have even visited www.galleryserverpro.com but had a hard time understanding all the technical mumbo jumbo.
Well, today I posted a 10-minute video demonstrating the major features. I designed it to be a quick intro into what GSP has to offer and I thought I would share it with you. It is basically me talking into a microphone while I interact with a sample gallery.
I spent about a day and a half putting it together. It turns out that it is virtually impossible for me to speak eloquently for 10 minutes, but I suppose you knew that already. I must have started over a couple dozen times. By the end I had pretty much memorized the entire presentation, which isn't good but winging it was much worse.
Not only was it difficult to speak without stuttering and screwing up my sentences, it was a real struggle to figure out what to say. I know enough about marketing to know that I should have talked about how GSP solves a problem in your life, but I just couldn't come up with the words. My brain is constrained to be a straight-ahead, here-are-the-features kind of guy. But that is not so bad since most of my audience is the same way. I am still happy with the result.
Deal with Microsoft
I have been in talks with Microsoft about ways to drastically increase the distribution of GSP. We are nearing final agreement on a deal that would include GSP in something called the Microsoft Web Application Gallery. This is a way for people to easily and quickly install complicated pieces of software - such as GSP - on web servers. Microsoft has warned me to make sure my web site is robust and can handle a dramatic increase in traffic; I guess the web sites of other recent additions were brought down by the traffic. They advised me to have a backup strategy in case my web site fails under the crush of thousands of users. Seems to me that is a good problem to have...
Hope everyone's summer is going well. Cheers!