Having worked on a platform such as Squiz Matrix for over four years, I grew accustomed to its pros and cons. Back in 2009, I was exposed to this new system after I helped to migrate the University of Westminster‘s website from old, out of date systems to a brand new installation of Matrix.
Back then, it was called Mysource Matrix and needless to say that in those early days, I made many mistakes that took additional time to fix.
After four years logging into the same system every day, I moved onto pastures new and back in time to an old version of Sharepoint. I didn’t realise that I would have a yearning to go back to Squiz Matrix but every issue I found with Sharepoint, I realised I was comparing it to the ease of use that Matrix could provide.
I would repeatedly try installations of Matrix but through the complexity and cost of purchasing my own VPS, I never had a version up and running.
Enter two factors
I’d been following Nic Hubbard of Zed Said Studios for a while on Twitter and within the Squiz Forums. I was one of the early adopters of the Squiz Matrix iOS app that he’d been developing for quite some time and decided recently that I need to get back into Squiz Matrix development.
At the same time, I was the recipient of a promoted tweet from Digital Ocean who were providing affordable VPS and promised simple set up. 55 seconds of setup!
A day later, a blog post from Zed Said Studios claimed that I could get Squiz Matrix installed in less than 10 minutes on Digital Ocean. Too good to be true?
It turns out that it wasn’t too good to be true. Now, I’m a command line newbie but Nic’s blog post got me about 99% of the way and a bit of googling got me the remaining 1% and now I have a successful Squiz Matrix install that doesn’t cost the earth.
Big thanks go out to Nic Hubbard of Zed Said Studios because his devotion to a platform and sharing his knowledge have given me a wealth of opportunities to develop my skills further.
