And that's how I like it. It's etymology is derived from metaphysics or metaphysical, but twists the highfalutin philosophical concept and makes it all cuddly and cute with a bubbly adjective.

Of course, using Meta in the name isn't too original for a web business. Let's see, there's...

• The everlasting social network Metafilter
• Awesome web design agency MetaLab
• Social game shop Meta+Level Games
• Several entities all known as Metaform: two product development shops, a synth-rock band, and a hip-hop producer

Visually, the word has a good shape. Two ascenders and one descender make for a nice bouma. Plus with that fi in the middle, I get a sweet ligature that'll tickle the ribs of any typophiles (more on that in another couple posts).

Naming a new endeavor is always sort of a hassle. It should be short, catchy, and generally relate to the product or service your pushing. But as a web-property, not only do you need a good name, you run into issues with availability for domain name or usernames like for Twitter. In my case, both metafizzy.com and @metafizzy are already taken. But I'm okay with sacrificing the untarnished username and .com domain in favor of a name I like. After all, if your service is good enough, people will find you.

When kicking around product ideas at nclud, I feel like we can get too wrapped up in finding the perfect domain name. Even worse, we start devising the best short URL for our imaginary service. It's like in high school, when you really wanted to start a band. So you start scribbling out names of your imaginary band. Then you start sketching logo concepts. When the entire time you should have been practicing guitar and writing songs.

So be sure to come out to the San Dimas High School Battle of Bands this Friday night, where my act Metafizzy will be taking on last semesters champs, Wyld Stallyns.

I'm starting a business. Its name is Metafizzy. The business makes money by selling licenses for delightful web resources that I make. Apart from those three sentences, I'm making this up as I go along.

Actually, that's a bit of hyperbole. I do have a general sense of what I want to accomplish and how to go about it. But for the most part, this whole thing is going to be one big experiment.

How I got here

A year and a half ago I released a jQuery plugin called Masonry. Since its initial release it has been especially successful both as a creation and as a mechanism for my career. The whole story of Masonry deserves its own blog post. The short version is that this one plugin has grown to be an especially popular front-end development resource, used by lots and lots of web developers. Masonry is used for Tumblr themes, Wordpress themes, professional portfolios, publications, corporate sites. Designers use it subtlety as a work-around for tricky layouts, and substantially as a piece of branding. Just yesterday, Matt McInerney, (the dude behind Raleway, the font I use for branding this site) mentioned his approval of Masonry. How cool is that?

As Masonry is open-source and free for commercial applications, it has been leveraged in a number of premium templates. This is awesome as my work can lead to some sort of money. And if the developers of the premium templates are making money off of my resources, why not me? Clearly there's a market for developers who use my work to turn a profit.

But I'd rather not slap a price tag on Masonry. It has always been free to use, which obviously aided in it gaining traction.

In October, I started development on a new plugin, called Isotope. Isotope is a suped up version of Masonry, plus the fun sorting and filtering interation of Quicksand. Isotope is friggin' awesome and I'm jazzed to finally start revealing what it can do.

Isotope is in fact so awesome, that it's worth paying for.

Now what

So the gist is to have people pay for this new plugin.

I'm still sorting out the particulars. You know, how they will pay, what they will pay, what they get, and all the icky business details in between. But I'm diving in. What's the worst that could happen?

Oh right, I guess the worst would be if someone sued my pants off. Since there's money exchanging hands, I might as well get legit and get incorporated. A couple days ago I received my certificate of organization for Metafizzy LLC. Yay, now you can only sue Metafizzy's pants off!

What's to come

My goal is to get the business off the ground in the next three months. I plan on blogging about all the minutiæ related to this endeavor, mostly front-end development and business stuff. Here goes nothing!