Most programmers have little ideas for websites and tools they would like to make on the side if they ever got the time - Mubashar Iqbal decided to take time off from his client work at Suffolk Software and set a strict development schedule so that he would release a new idea Every 5 Weeks. The schedule says that over 50 weeks 10 projects will be launched and they will be fully functional original websites, not just demos of proof of concepts.

Some of the projects released so far include Domain Log Book, Most Hired, Design by Grid, For Sale by Publisher.

Where do the actual site ideas come from? Why did you decide to go public with Every 5 Weeks?

The ideas I’ve been developing are mostly things that I need myself. As
the old saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention. Some of the
ideas have been bouncing around my head for years.

There were 2 reasons for starting the project:

• I wanted to force a schedule on myself. With a full time job and life, ideas for website that I’d like to build always seemed to find the back burner. With a public schedule I hoped I’d motivate myself to make the time to work on the projects.
• With so many projects coming I wanted an easy way to promote them. I hoped that as the number of projects increased I’d have a built in audience for the later sites. I could have done that with my blog, but I decided a separate website dedicated to the project would likely get more links and be easier to direct people to.

Flickr started as a computer game, BMW started in aviation, Nokia was a wood-pulp mill before making gumboots and other things before they even though about mobile phones - do you believe that you can’t stick too closely to the original ideas? Have any of your ideas changed already since you first thought of them?

Most of the idea’s I’ve developed have had a fairly narrow focus, and
I’m not sure how much they could change.

The companies you mentioned they seem to do one thing very well at a time, which warrants a change of direction every now and then.

The number of sites I’ve developed with differing themes you could say I’ve already changed focus of the project, although in some ways having a diverse topic base is a big part of the project.

It’s a fine line between believing in what you’re doing, battling over obstacles to achieve your goals, and knowing when the gig is up and having to change what you’re doing.

You’ve got a heavy release schedule - what tools are you using to make it possible? Can you run us through the process you use, form the initial idea to the final website?

In terms of the process, I think I covered this in my blog post: So you have an idea.

I try and keep things pretty simple. I can’t rate a pen and piece of paper highly enough for brain storming, laying out a website, designing a database model, or listing things I need todo.

I use a few software applications during the process:
- Photoshop
- E (text editor, Textmate like for Windows)
- Filezilla
- MySQL Front

You’re going to release a framework called Fraction that you use to build the sites. What is it, and what makes it different from all the other web frameworks out there?

Fraction is a framework for PHP based web application development. It borrows heavily from 2 established frameworks: Ruby on Rails and Fusebox.

It combines what I believed to the best features from both those frameworks into something that is very efficient but most just as importantly allows me great flexibility when I build my websites.

It’s hard to say what makes one framework better than another, often it’s just about how well it fits with the way you build websites. Since I built this framework, as you can imagine it fits well with my approach.

I’m actually having seconds thoughts about releasing Fraction, with the amount of work on my plate already, I’m not sure I would have time to give the support necessary for a public release.

Having released 9 projects already, which has been the most successful and why? How do you measure their success?

Since most of the projects I’ve built have been things that I wanted or
needed to build for myself (making them multi users capable is not much extra work), I didn’t really have any goals in terms of users or revenue for the projects. I figured if I needed them, then other people probably would too.

In terms of usage and general feedback, Domain Log Book is probably the most successful right how, but being that it was the first project it has had more time to get traction. As of today there are just over 1,250 users, tracking nearly 6000 domains.

What is going to happen at the end of the scheduled 50 weeks?

I doubt that I’ll stop developing projects at the end of the 50 weeks, maybe with fever ideas left undeveloped it’ll be every 10 weeks instead.

Thanks Mubs, I look forward to seeing what you come up with next! You can follow him at Every 5 Weeks.

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Posted on August 30th, 2007 by Ross