Thanks for all the positive discussion. :-) Point 2 and other posts I've made talk about what happened. More importantly, I lost the momentum, which should have carried me to much greater wealth.
With the lessons learned, being poor is only a temporary state that will be in the past soon enough. This makes me feel just fine about writing all the details of what I did right and wrong for those who are interested. It will just take time.
Shafqat, I'm all over the web! I'm surprised you couldn't find me. Not to mention the links on my blog. :-)
I was that guy, except I had loads of ideas. I even created them, includidng the first content management system ever, which I designed and was in use by our web development clients in 1994, for a company I owned.
Sadly, I had no freaking idea how to market, run a business, get funding, get mass customers, or anything else of use. Eventually I figured enough of it out to launch a profitable startup, but it took 15 years. lol.
I think the most important thing to success you need is a successful mentor, who is doing something similar to what you want to achieve. The more the better. That was the major turning point for me.
I was expecting much different answers, so this is interesting. It sounds like there probably isn't any real reason to not continue with PHP, which will be quicker to get up to speed with current standards.
I'll do some more research on the options suggested though.
You're kind of asking what's better between vi and emacs.
I would recommend spending some time checking out either Django (http://djangoproject.com/) or Pylons (http://pylonshq.com/) on the Python side and I think Rails is probably going to be the best place to start on the Ruby side of the equation.
Any of those should be a good place to start, it's really a matter of personal preference between the three at this point.
