What.IsViable?org

This is a great article from Wired titled Straight Dope on the IPod’s Birth.
I’ve been facinated with the iPod in terms of it’s simplicity of operations and ease of use. Originally my wife bought me a Creative Labs Nomad MP3 player for Xmas a few years ago. As with most cutting edge stuff it was painful to use and load and navigate, but hey, it was a portable MP3 player. Needless to say it didn’t get enough use to make it worthwhile. It was pretty much relegated to road trips where it could stay plugged in. Even then, navigating to an improptu song wasn’t very easy with it’s interface. While readin g the article, the first thing that confirmed my feelings about how well Apple had approached the iPod was that iTunes was FIRST. They understand more than any company that the value chain of experience using a product is paramount. Also, I was impressed to find that they cobbled the iPod together from much off the shelf hardware. It’s easy to think that Apple with all it’s might just commands hardware vendors to build what it wants. Not true. This gives hope to projects like my own DenizenBox and others who don’t have the clout to play with the big boys as far as ordering volumes of hardware. The other main point that I think runs clear is that they spent much of their time trying to simplifiy the user experience. I think this is probably the greatest challenge of our day. In a world where more is better, I thing less is more should be the mantra of the future.

I spent a lot of time porting What.IsViable.org from to Drupal to Wordpress last night. I had originally used Drupal because at the time it seemed to have the greatest flexability for extending it in new ways. I was using it as the basis for a project that would involve users creating their own areas of community.

Alas, that project didn’t move forwardward and my blog became overly cumbersome to use. I didn’t post very often and I was starting to feel that I wasn’t cut out for blogging. Anyway, just got back from ConvergeSouth and I’m inspired to get back into it. Maybe this time it will stick with me.

Another selfish reason to switch to WordPress is that I’ve now got it running on my DenizenBox. I have been using a blog called Pivot because it didn’t require a database back-end. I have since found a way to get SQLite working on DenizenBox and that pretty much opens up a LAMPalike stack and thus also the world of many LAMP applications(with a little porting). Anyway, I you want to see that working, click here.