I’m long overdue to write about the proposed business model for RememberOneAnother.com. In a nutshell, it is my desire that the service remain free for individuals and that IT resources be paid for via a subscription plan for churches and other Christian groups (missionary organizations, Bible studies, houses of prayer, etc.).

What do you think of the following model?

• Free (individual) accounts will allow you to join as many groups as you like and create up to two private groups of your own with no more than, say, 13 members each. This way, everyone can share prayer requests with a group of close friends and family members for free.
• A small group account designed for Bible studies would allow you to create a public group (listed in searches) with, say, up to 40 members for something like $25/yr.
• A church account would give your church a public listing and info page and would allow the church to create an all-church group with up to 400 users and an unlimited number of sub-groups for something like $250/yr
• Finally, there would be a mega-church or large organization account with still larger numbers of users and dollars attached…

An alternate model would limit the number of groups an individual could join with a free account. In this model, the small group and church rates would be reduced and offset by the sale of individual pro accounts for people who connect to a large number of groups. This perhaps more equitably distributes the operational expenses between individuals and groups.

What are your thoughts? Please post a reply below.

ROAblog now has an official address: blog.RememberOneAnother.com.

Unfortunately, I learned I cannot host the top-level site here (RememberOneAnother.com) without changing my domain’s nameservers to WordPress. But this would prevent me from pointing other addresses in the domain to the Google AppEngine servers. Otherwise, I think I could have made it work using a custom CSS and the flexible Sandbox theme. So I’ll be using Google AppEngine to host the main site instead. That might be easier, anyway, as the CSS would have gotten pretty messy. Sometimes you just need to be able to edit a page…

I finally decided to host the ROA Web site on WordPress.com for the excellent content management system and great selection of widgets. Not to mention I’m tired of maintaining servers! In preparation for the imminent public launch, I shelled out $15 for the custom CSS option and modified the Digg 3 theme with the ROA logo. Also, I discovered that ROA has had an email subscription widget all along, which is great for ROA fans who do not use a blog reader like Google Reader. I’ll point the RememberOneAnother.com here shortly, and we be rollin’.

I’ve been receiving the daily emails for several days now, and it does exactly what I had hoped: remind me to pray for specific people each day. Here’s a sample:

Your daily ROA for December 1, 2009

My Friends
==========================
Andrew

My Family
==========================
Rebekah
Anna
Karen

DI Bible Study
==========================
Hong

I don’t have a lot of people / requests in my dev database yet, but even with a minimal start, it’s already been a blessing to my prayer life, and I trust it will be to yours, too.

This was an extra special Thanksgiving for me. It was to great to see my parents, siblings, nephews, nieces, and grandparents again, and to top it off, on the day after I successfully received the first daily ROA prayer email. My brother-in-law and I were sitting at my folks’ kitchen table, laptops facing each other, while he worked on his family’s Christmas DVD and I struggled with a couple thorny technical issues that were holding up the daily ROA email. When I announced triumphantly that I had gotten it to work, Fred said simply, “Good–I was praying for you!” It is a tremendous blessing to know that God is interested in the details of our lives, even technical problems! I have seen this almost daily since I started the project.

It should not surprise anyone that a project devoted to helping Christians pray more effectively owes its entire existence to prayer, as it most certainly does. The Lord has given me many gifts, but I have felt myself again and again coding beyond my natural ability on this project. The continued motivation and ability to “keep on keeping on” is His doing. What great things God is capable of when we ask Him! I do not possess the resources to pull off a project like this. Some well-meaning folks would say, “no, you need to believe in yourself.” But there is Someone so much greater to believe in!

With man, this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.

Matt. 19:26, NIV

This realization only further fuels my desire and motivation to help Christians become awesome at praying. I am more convinced than ever that prayer is where the battle is, and I am almost giddy with the excitement of being a part of what God is doing through prayer. Thank you for praying!

The past week feels like it has really flown by, no doubt in part to my very earnest effort and desire to get the daily email going. I came very close and might have made it had it not been for a thing of beauty in code that commanded my attention yesterday and a very weird thing that prevented me today from successfully using the thing of beauty to send out daily emails.

In addition, I’ve not wanted to start sending the daily prayer list emails without a way for users to disable this feature. That requires a new page, a new field in the database, and everything in between. Worst of all, it requires me to make a decision about UI design, which is paralyzing for me, but I will try to just put something out there and rework it later.

The great news is that I did resolve the very weird thing and have been successfully sending out admin emails to myself, so all the underlying pieces are now in place to do the daily prayer list email. I’m more impressed than ever with Google AppEngine (ROA’s hosting platform). It’s not being noticed much in the business press, I don’t think, but I’m convinced it is a game-changer that will open up a whole new world of custom and niche applications.

As always, thank you for praying. For a while there, I didn’t think I was going to make it, but the Lord has given me grace to persevere and to keep chasing the lion…

I completed a major code refactoring today to separate the admin UI from the public Web app UI. The admin UI is needed to manage the daily email queues, and I’ve been putting off building it, but the shell is now in place and we’re scooting along. This was huge as I was very discouraged earlier today, but the Lord gave grace in the form of a burst of coding and problem-solving energy. Thank you for praying.

After much hand-wringing, I have finally managed to get Daily ROA working in the Web app. This is the core of RememberOneAnother. It collates prayer requests from all your prayer lists into a single daily prayer list. Currently, all prayer lists default to weekly rotation, which you cannot change (yet). You can, however, shuffle each list.

In order to try it out, you’ll need to delete any existing prayer lists and create new ones.

Try it out at http://dmcsandbox.appspot.com. Don’t spend too much effort here in the sandbox, as you’ll need to recreate your lists when the app gets its real URL. But do try it out and let me know what you think. I know the UI needs a lot of prettying up. Volunteers welcome!

If you know Java Web development and would like to learn GWT and Google AppEngine, I’d like to talk with you. I am underwater on this project and could really use a coding partner to keep things moving. Please shoot me a note at dchandler ‘at’ turbomanage d0t com.

Olympic athlete and later missionary Eric Liddle said in the movie Chariots of Fire, “When I run, I feel His pleasure.” There have been a few times in my career when I have had the exhilarating sense of knowing that this is what I was made for. Now is one of those times, and I am very grateful for it. Hours seemed like minutes. I thoroughly enjoyed coding, and even more enjoyed writing about it at my geek blog, TurboManage, which this week grew to over 300 page views in one day. My corporate job of seven weeks ago now seems like a distant memory. I am inclined to suggest that every software engineer should save up and take a four-month sabbatical every few years to enjoy coding again. My spirit has been so refreshed!

Praise the Lord for significant progress this week! I crossed a couple more technical hurdles around unit testing and the database, so the pool of technical unknowns continues to dwindle. I have released an alpha version at dmcsandbox.appspot.com. It doesn’t look real pretty yet, and doesn’t have a fraction of the features that the finished product will have; nevertheless, you can login with your Gmail account, create prayer lists, and add prayer requests that will still be there next time you log in. No daily email yet, no editing, and no sharing with groups. But it’s a start, and it’s live for you to preview.

This coming week I will, Lord-willing, complete editing capability for prayer requests, start the daily email, and launch the RememberOneAnother.com Web site (but not the app yet).

Please note: any data you create at the sandbox site is test data. The real app will be launched at a different URL with a clean database, but please do feel free to log in now and post any usability comments back here.

Thank you for your prayers, and please keep praying!