Simplicity Rules

The Simple Solution That Stopped Wandering Patients

29. April 2010

“Occasionally people slip out the front door and then they wander.” That was the problem facing a senior center in Germany. Their patients, afflicted with dementia or Alzheimer’s, would walk away in a desperate search for a reality that only exists in their heads. The story is told in fifteen minutes on an episode of the [...]

Unrut Yourself: My Six Week Side Project

19. January 2010

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Almost every day I walk down to a local Mexican restaurant and spend at least an hour there. The same restaurant. Every day. I may have mentioned this before. If there is anyone who needs out of a rut, it’s me. That fact gave me an idea for a new side project, which I started [...]

Social Software Needs More Context

8. December 2009

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I have a problem: I don’t remember who you are. Okay, maybe not you, but in my travels around the Internet, I sometimes become connected to someone on a social website that I don’t remember. I could use a little context, some help triggering my memory. Has there ever been a time when the average person [...]

Make Up Units to Simplify Your World

1. December 2009

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Lately I’ve been thinking of distances in terms of a strange unit you’ve never heard of: the LaBo. You’ve never heard of it because I made it up. It’s the number of steps between my house and the local Mexican restaurant, La Bonita. While I was actively writing my book I would go to La Bonita [...]

Give a Simple Gift Through Advertising

17. November 2009

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I’m not sure why I never thought of this. Want to make someone feel good? Create a Google Ad using his name as the keywords. Then, when he does his next vanity search, he’ll see your message front and center (or, well, off to the right, probably). This is exactly what happened to my friend Rick [...]

What is Personal Feature Creep?

26. October 2009

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When creating products, feature creep is the usually slow process by which additional complexity is added. It is not intentional, but it is normal. And it doesn’t stop at your projects, either. It infiltrates your life, creating personal feature creep. Rather than additional functionality, personal features are usually commitments we’ve made, or ventures we’ve taken on. [...]

Blog Software Is No Longer About Blogging

21. September 2009

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Blogging became popular because tools made it easy for anyone to write on the web. Type your genius into a box, hit a button and the whole world can see it. Look out, I’m doing it now. Now we have many choices when it comes to expressing ourselves online. Yet, the strange thing is, it’s getting [...]

What To Do When That Email Address Already Exists

21. July 2009

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It’s not often that an account signup process on a website makes me happy. This happened today and I would love to share it with you. I was covering MapQuest’s new directions API for ProgrammableWeb. Like most API providers, MapQuest requires developers to register. I thought I might have signed up, but the first username/password combo [...]

How Not to Select a Future Date

3. July 2009

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I just returned from a cruise to Alaska. We made a quick swing through Victoria in Canada, which required the cruise line to collect my passport information. Like many people who find themselves with rare travel to another country, I just recently renewed my passport. That ended up being a pain using the site’s calendar-based [...]

Lifestreaming Needs More Context

4. June 2009

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We’re all creating a lot of content these days. We write blog posts, share our location, store links, microblog on Twitter, and more. Others can see the latest stuff, subscribe to updates in RSS, and view individual chunks of content. In many cases, seeing old content in context is difficult. I can look at one blog [...]

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The Simple Solution That Stopped Wandering Patients

Unrut Yourself: My Six Week Side Project

Social Software Needs More Context

Make Up Units to Simplify Your World

Give a Simple Gift Through Advertising

What is Personal Feature Creep?

Blog Software Is No Longer About Blogging

What To Do When That Email Address Already Exists

How Not to Select a Future Date

Lifestreaming Needs More Context

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