18 Days 9 Hours And A Handful of Minutes.

I've generally tried to keep business and blog separated by a wide gulf. It's better that way. After all, this blog isn't a subtle advertisement for our latest nutritional products... it's just a bear pontificating, pretending he knows more than he probably does.

Today though, and for the rest of August, I'm going to make an exception. I'm going to bombard you with some unashamed self promotion.

About 6 years ago, I started something... a small web programming task that was supposed to take a couple of weeks. Now don't get me wrong. Those of you who know me will quickly point out that I definitely don't have a pocket protector and that I used to find it too easy to pick up girls to be a programmer. No. I was just dabbling, writing something called a "content manager", mostly because I wanted to teach myself something new.

A "content manager" is software that's supposed to make it easy to create and update web sites by storing the content of the site in a database. You know what I mean because Blogger is a content manager.

We were trying to write an on-line magazine for a little side-project I was involved in back then, and creating the content manager seemed easier than coding a brand new web page each time I wanted to add a story. If only I'd known then what I know now, but there's nothing like a retrospectoscope to clarify one's thoughts and I don't have one.

So when that business was stillborn, I kept the code and continued to work on it, and work on it, and work on it, and work on it. (Six years. That's nearly 20% of my adult life. Fuck! What a potentially huge waste of time.)

My simple project's grown a bit since then, and we use it in my other business every day. (If you want to see it at work, go to http://www.rplus.com.au/, though what you're looking at there is the version before the version before last... what I have now is way more powerful and infinitely easier to use.

So for six years, line by line, piece by piece, sometimes by evolution, sometimes by osmosis and sometimes by blind luck, I've been cobbling this thing together. It's probably been harder than it otherwise might have been because I'm not a really great code cutter, but oh my...

... the end result is brilliant. Really, it is. And if you had the slightest inkling of how it actually works, and the pain I suffered to make it work, you'd think so too.

What's so brilliant about it? Oh. I'm glad you asked.

Wroof! (that's what it's called) is the ultimate in content management. You can create a magazine, with stories, forums, blogs, photo galleries, and comments. You can allocate different sections in your magazine to different editors, and then tie magazine stories into products in the built-in shopping cart, which is then linked to an optional built-in multi-store point-of-sale system. Wroof! even comes with an up-to-date currency converter.

You can put different content on different pages, and control who sees what content via an 8 level security system. You can even sell subscriptions to your site, with different subscription levels having access to different content.

And that's just the beginning.

Wroof launches to the world on August 24... 18 days 9 hours and a handful of minutes away.

Want to see for your self? Go to http://www.wroof.com/ and watch the little clock count down.