You can run Django in Iron­Python under .Net. Awe­some. A Windows-based server is sud­denly a choice again, which is… fan­tas­tic. Mostly for pip­ing doc­u­ments through MS Office prod­ucts for index­ing and PDF gen­er­a­tion, because OO.o is great with Word docs but not so great — font siz­ing issues, etc. — with other things, espe­cially Pow­er­Point, which could account for up to a quar­ter of the con­tent con­tributed by users, I’d say. So I can run native MS Office -> Post­Script export -> ps2pdf processes, and MS Office -> Hor­ri­ble XML -> Scrub markup fil­ters -> Search index, with­out hav­ing to bat­tle with Wine, etc.

Of course, the sec­ond process would prob­a­bly ben­e­fit from using OO.o as a pro­cess­ing envi­ron­ment, but that’s equally achiev­able on a Win­dows or *nix platform.

So many fears about plat­form (OS and lan­guage) have been suf­fi­ciently allayed. Which is kind of annoy­ing, because, all of a sud­den, .Net is actu­ally an option. I’m still con­fused over data­bases though, so there’s plenty of befud­dle­ment to go around. Ulti­mately it doesn’t mat­ter a great deal if we find the right devel­oper (for what­ever lan­guage… except obscure things like Smalltalk and Ruby … oh did I say that? … doo be doo — just for future-proofing/maintenance rea­sons), which, hope­fully, we will. Another meet­ing about money for this thing is hap­pen­ing on Decem­ber 13^th, so prayer is very wel­come for that! I want $35,000 to spend over about two and a half months to pay one other devel­oper and out­source design, as well as myself, of course (the front-end dude). By the end of that time we’ll hope­fully have an absolutely fan­tas­tic solu­tion that will mag­i­cally pro­pel (not that I really want to use Pro­pel, because that’s for PHP ;-)) itself for­ever… yeah, right.

We’ve got a half-baked busi­ness plan for this thing (by half-baked, I mean it’s all stuff I’ve writ­ten and the real gurus haven’t had any­thing to do with the num­bers, etc., so it’s not really autho­r­a­tive) that should get it out of the red by a cou­ple of months in (which is ridicu­lously quick… another rea­son to think it’s half-baked) and allow for clean­ing up all the bits we missed in the hec­tic two and a bit months it was orig­i­nally thrown together in, but, at the same time, it’s going to be par­tially depen­dent on licensed, pub­lished (dead tree) con­tent (i.e. not just user-contributed stuff, which, longer term, will hope­fully account for the bulk of sales — the profit mar­gin is lower, but it’s also eas­ier to move more units because of the sheer scope of con­tent we’re hop­ing will be available) — so because we’re licens­ing that rev­enue is going to be eaten into by pub­lish­ing divi­sion and other con­tent sources.

All of that is, of course, depen­dent on peo­ple want­ing to use these things (they do, but from there it’s a ques­tion of mak­ing the prod­uct known to them and mak­ing adop­tion easy) and being okay with shar­ing stuff they’ve writ­ten. Some knee-jerk reac­tions have been neg­a­tive to that, but the objec­tions were accom­pa­nied by acknowl­edge­ment of a need to think more about what shar­ing con­tent is doing — that is, why we’re both­er­ing to cre­ate this site anyway.

Which, I have realised, I have not shared here yet. I want to write it another time because I think I’m get­ting clearer at explain­ing what we’re try­ing to do every time I try, so it’s no bad thing repeat­ing myself. Here’s a brief overview of what Josh does (or, is try­ing to do) at Youth­works.