Useful SaaS Apps For Individuals and Businesses
January 2, 2021 — Almost wrote 2020! Hard to believe that another year has gone by already! Honestly, some of us could say that 2020 was the absolute worst year ever, and to an extent, it was. But there was a lot of good that came out of it. For NoteToServices, in 2020, this was just the case! For example, I wrote a book called My Life As A Woman: World Edition (Amazon link), which was part of the My Life As A Woman Project Initiative, in which I sought to understand the lives of women in every country in the entire world. From Australia to China to Malaysia and across Europe, from Russia to the United Kingdom, through South Africa, over to South America, and up to the United States and Canada. It was an amazing accomplishment that resulted in the stories of 530 women from around the world. You could say that although 2020 was a year filled with disappointment and fear, there were many people starting businesses and accomplishing things that otherwise would have never been possible.
With that said, I accidentally overwrote a file on the main NoteToServices server, causing the entire server to crash, and in a perfect storm, the backup server crashed as well. This was horrible and caused the loss of over 20 completed web apps. While not all were lost, as we did have some data backed up, the data was, unfortunately, about a year or two old, so while I'm working on restoring many of these projects, it is not an overnight process. Since the code is old, I am also taking some time to rewrite and revise these web apps. With more knowledge than when I started, as many of these projects came about when I was still learning a lot, I do know more now, and have been coding much more efficiently. In addition, the data is now being backed and living on Github. This could be considered some of the bad that happened in 2020, but it also has allowed me to focus on the quality of the more important web apps rather than just the quality.
This year, in 2020, as I have been working for RunCloud for over 2 years now and helping them to improve their service, specifically, I do the writing for the knowledgebase, the blog, and also focus on UI user-friendliness, ensuring customer service and support is top notch, and suggesting new features, as well as bug reports. When I first started with RunCloud, they were very young and I hadn't fully felt I could migrate to their service full-time, but in the 2 years I've been with RunCloud, I can see a massive improvement and difference in their service. Therefore, I decided to move from NoteToServices' web apps from ServerPilot to RunCloud. I've been very satisfied with their service and support team, especially with the additional stack of having NGINX, which I feel is slightly better than Apache.
As I was working to complete the My Life As A Woman Project Initative, and dealing with the server crash, I have been focusing as well on rebuilding the web apps. This year, I was able to rebuild BunnyAPI for BunnyCDN from the ground up and focus on making it better. Mission accomplished. In addition, I was also able to build a Upload Media By URL plugin as WordPress went through its own set of changes. As I sought to understand the future of my own company, I realize that WordPress will definitely be playing a big part, so working on several WordPress plugins is a definite in the future.
While it is not finished, I also began working on a project that I've been wanting to do forever. Several years ago, DreamHost came out with an amazing storage service called DreamObjects, which is a very affordable service, surpassing AWS and many other CDNs, though I'd say its best competitor is actually BunnyCDN. DreamHost originally came out with a WordPress plugin called DreamSpeedCDN and after about a year, they discontinued it, rendering any possible usage between DreamObjects and a WordPress website useless, which ultimately made its CDN service somewhat useless. You could download some plugins that could help, but none were specifically designed for DreamObjects. I believe I was and am still using a plugin called Ilab Media Tools which works to an extent. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. For a long time, it was not, which inspired me to start working on a service called DreamAPI which would help developers and WordPress users connect their website to DreamObjects and use it as a CDN. In addition, I've also built a WordPress plugin for it, though as of this writing, both are still in pre-beta and have not been officially released to the public.
Finally, I also got around to working on a minor web app I had loved and wanted to see back up, which is a website visitor tracker, and loads with ease, without any cookies or javascript, but rather actually uses an image for tracking. The web app is called JustCounts and got some major upgrades from version 1 to version 2 including faster load times, better counter stats screen, ability to reset and delete counter, ability to see IP addresses, along with some other very useful analytics data. The web app is completely free to use but a Pro version is available to enable all the extra features.
So in a final say about 2020: it's been full of ups and downs. It is no different than any other year, thought this year was more about staying at home, figuring out how to live with ourselves or our families or spouses, and also working at home, while understanding what to do that could still help improve the world. Many of us saw opportunities to do something with so much free time. The highlight of the day wasn't just going from bed to couch, but rather, releasing a new web app, creating something new and amazing, and sharing it with the world. With that said, I hope you find the tools of NoteToServices useful, though there are still plenty more coming from my creative and constructive brain and knowledge! If you haven't used anything we built, rest assured, you can trust it, and I have been working on multiple safety backup methods to ensure that no matter what happens, our service is never interrupted again.
I wish you a very happy and successful new year. We finally made it. Welcome to 2021!