Simplicity Rules

In Oregon we vote by mail. There are no polling places, but voters have a chance to spread their voting out and find the time to make informed decisions.

If you are not in Oregon, please mark November 7 on your calendar now. Plan when you’ll visit your polling place. Don’t let yourself not have enough time.

If you’re in Oregon and haven’t opened that ballot, I encourage you to start now. There are some confusing measures and beginning early will ensure you get to read arguments from both sides.

Andy Sack is the CEO of Judy’s Book. He has been sharing his experiences starting and running the social shopping site. Today he wrote this about leadership:

The leader of a business must fight this complexity — and communicate simplicity to the world, to customers, and to employees.

Naturally, I agree. I also think that simplicity is everyone’s job. If you aren’t making things simple, you’re making them complicated. Organizations, be they businesses, countries, or groups of friends, are not top-down. Reducing complexity is everyone’s responsibility.

The brain can only hold so much information at a time. I’ve heard the phrase “five plus or minus two” used a lot. It looks like the original theory (from the fifties) was seven plus or minus two. The point is there is a limit and productivity is about finding good stuff to put in your available buckets. It’s something that should be important to everyone, in every organization.

I’m seeing a number of Web sites pop up that do exactly one thing. They are often an off-shoot of another site. The one trick ponies focus in on the single thing they do, probably in an effort to get people like me to link to them.

Rentometer gets your zip code, rent, and simple information about your apartment and tells you whether you’re paying too much or too little. The chart I’ve included shows why I’m not a home owner. The orange needle represents the median mortgage payment.

This is put together by an outfit that sells property management software. So, this tool might be of more use to somebody wanting to set a rental price.

Tom found the Global Rich List, a site that shows where your salary ranks compared to the rest of the world. Hint: you are very rich. The example above shows the US poverty level (just shy of $10k / year).

This is made by a Web design firm in London. The organization they recommend people support is Care International. I’ve been approached on the streets of Portland a kabillion times by Care and I’ve never been as open to helping them out as I am now. It’s the soft sell.

But it’s also the simplicity of their approach. There is minimal navigation and both of these are extremely interactive. I put in some stuff and it shoots out an answer just for me.

I’m starting in on my fourth year in Portland (tenth in Oregon!) and I have a handful of technical group meetings I attend. If you’re looking for an exhaustive list, look to Web Things Considered. Below are my thoughts on the ones I know.

Web Innovators:
Monthly gathering for area developers, designers, entrepreneurs, early-stage companies, and those who want to meet them. I helped start it and, as with any group (especially new ones), it takes a lot to keep it going. We’ve had a lot of good discussions and I’ve met some great people. I’m continually amazed at the enormous supply of talent in Portland. Web Innovators has been a good way to get those people out of the woodwork (or from behind the computer, as the case may be).

Another plus for me is that attendees haven’t been married to a technology. Sure, we all have our pet languages and programs, but I think that Web Innovators haven’t been militant about it shows that we understand innovating is about being flexible.

Open Source Entrepreneurs:
POSSE, as we call it, is a group of people who believe OS can help businesses succeed. Portland has emerged as a mecca for the Open Source movement. POSSE is poised to make a big difference and hopefully be an example for future groups across the US and internationally.

It’s an invite-only, dues-paying sort of group, but if you’re into OS I encourage you to contact me. I’d be happy to bring you to a meeting.

DevGroup NW:
I’ve heard DevGroup described as a place to see Macromedia product demos and just a front for its sponsors. I’ve picked and chose based on the topics and been pleased with what I’ve seen. It gets an wide range of types of attendees. And since the group helps put on Webvisions, it means they get some good speakers coming through town.

Perl Mongers:
I’m not actually a member of PDX PM, but I’ve gone to a few meetings. If you use Perl much and live in Portland, there’s really no excuse for not going to this group. In no other city is there a higher O’Reilly author per capita ratio.

Go to one of their Lightning Talk meetings to get a great overview of the type of topics the group discusses.

We had our first big rain of the fall today. I’m sitting in a coffee shop, soaked. The front of my light grey sweat pants are colored several shades darker by their wetness. It’s from the downside to Portland’s popular coffee culture.

Earlier I set off to a WiFi spot in one of my new favorite neighborhoods, Mississippi. On the way to the bus, the rain was pretty nasty, so I decided to go to Tiny’s Coffee, my closest WiFi shop. But it was full.

So, I went back to plan A and hopped on the bus. As I walked toward Albina Press I worried about whether they took cards. The Visa logo on the door made me feel better. All the tables were taken, but there was a back room with some open couches. Now, I know coffee shop etiquette and one look at the four ladies in front of me said those sofas weren’t for me.

Fresh Pot North? No cards (”thank you for understanding”). Crow Bar? Closed. Back on the bus, I ended up here at Goldrush Coffee Bar. It was virtually empty and thank goodness. I can dry off and get some work done.

Once you have a site with good, clean URLs, the next step is to make sure they never change. It’s a simple mantra to have, but a tough one to follow through on.

You see, sometimes you have to change URLs. A new content management system might demand a certain structure. You might be improving your organization to have site sections. Heck, your wacky Web Developer might be changing programming languages.

In that case, make sure the old pages remain immortal. Don’t just redirect pages not found to the home page. That’s a cop out. Go to the effort of determining every broken page on your site and make sure it redirects to the new page. This is a lot of work, but both users and search engines like it.

When I switched from Blogger to Wordpress, there were all sorts of changes. The whole URL structure changed, which breaks my immortal URL rule. That meant I needed to do some extra work to make sure that the Blogger URLs were not forgotten and that they found their way to the new structure.

The solution was permanent redirects on the server. I have about 100 lines in my .htaccess file that look like this:
Redirect permanent /news/2005/07/trailboss-best-band-that-never-was.html http://www.adamduvander.com/me/trailboss-the-best-band-that-never-was

Just a couple weeks ago I decided that my Weird Al CD post was more about me than keeping things simple. I switched its category, which changed the URL. Then I made sure the old, broken one would remain immortal by redirecting it.

If your server uses Apache (and most do), check out their docs for more information.

Almost a year ago, I mentioned Save My Finger. It was a certain link-bait scenario. Pretty sleazy, really. There were plenty of people, myself included, who rubber-necked at the accident.

In April, we learned what we already knew: Carl, scheduled to lose his finger, was fictional. It was a viral marketing “experiment.” Using that word is another way of saying it wasn’t an out-of-the-park hit. The site didn’t make it to the two million unique visitors that it needed to save Carl’s finger.

Yet, SaveMyFinger guy calls it a success:

My point in this experiment was to prove that it IS possible to open up a website and within days if not hours be receiving massive traffic. Internet marketing is a numbers game, regardless of what you are selling or how you are monetizing your website, Traffic is KING!

Egads. Anyone ever built a campfire? With a match and newspaper, it’s easy to get a flame. It doesn’t last long. For that you need wood. You need patience. You need to do good stuff.

I wouldn’t write off viral marketing. There will always be hucksters and used car salesmen doing it badly, burning the newspaper, and catching the momentary attention of the rubber-neckers.

I hope I have the patience not to be one.