Simplicity Rules

Starting yesterday my daily routine with DuVinci has changed drastically. During (an extremely busy) July I phased out the work for BestPlaces that I have been doing in some capacity since 2001. It’s time for me to focus on something new.

I want to help others create on the Web. There are designers with great skills who want to learn to program. And there are bright business owners who can’t execute on their ideas. I believe anyone can learn to program. I’m looking forward to proving that.

Right now you can see my first steps at Webmonkey. I’ve written for the site since 2000, but now I’m joining as a contributor on the Monkeybites blog and writing about a tutorial per week.

The move from BestPlaces is tough. I believe in the aim of the site and the people behind it. In fact, I’ll be helping them out a bit here and there.

I’m excited about my next steps and look forward to hearing your ideas. Many thanks to those who’ve already given me such wonderful advice. I hope to receive more of it soon.

Sticky note pic by striatic

It’s been quite the ride for my favorite monkey, but I’m delighted to see that Wired has resuscitated Webmonkey, the how-to site that helped many in the early days learn how to make the web work.

For those who don’t know the backstory, Webmonkey was mothballed almost two years ago. Before that, it was revived from a previous death. This time looks for real because Wired owns the site and did some work to re-architect it.

What makes me happiest about Webmonkey’s return is that it received a lot of attention before launch this time. The site, now mostly a Wiki, looks like it belongs in 2008. Readers can rate articles, comment, and edit them when they get out-dated. Major props to Mike Calore and his team for their effort to bring the ‘monkey back in such a big way.

Since 2000, I’m proud to have been a Webmonkey author. Over the last couple months, I’ve been writing a few more how-tos that will make their way online in the next few weeks. I’m proud to be part of it again. Welcome back, Webmonkey!

Last week the BestPlaces team pulled together a small, simple site to help people gain a big insight into drought in the U.S. with DroughtScore.

The site takes a city name or zip code as input and spits back a score, based on 100 being normal. For example, Portland is 107.2, mild drought.

DroughtScore is a microsite, which I’ve in the past called
one trick ponies. I mean it as a compliment. By focusing on a single purpose, it helps communicate only what is important to the user. With DroughtScore, I hope we found the sticky substance.

Try it out with your town.

The Portland Web Innovators have had a number of great meetings since Ryan and I cooked up the idea in February 2006. This year, especially, has had some great speakers and topics. Here are a few selected meetings from 2007:

• Firefox 3 preview with Dietrich Ayala
• Commoditization of Web Applications with Marshall Kirkpatrick
• Side Project as Resume with the Unthirsty guys
• OpenID and Digital Identity with JanRain
• Widgets with StepChange

We’re finishing the year with two more great meetings:

• November 7: RSS and Attention with Attensa
• December 5: Community with Dawn Foster

Web Innovator meetings start at 7 p.m. on the first Wednesday of every month.

Earlier this week, BestPlaces added a small new feature, which drastically increases the usefulness of the site. Internally, we call it the zoomer, and it allows our visitors to view a greater area around places they are researching.

Essentially, when viewing a city (Portland, for example), you can zoom in on zip codes and zoom out to the county, metro area, or state. Similarly, you can zoom back in, perhaps locating places you didn’t know existed.

We’ve always had data on tens of thousands of places. We did pretty good at showing cities, an okay job of profiling neighborhoods, but now we’re showing everything.

Two weeks ago, we launched a new design. For a number of reasons, the previous one had degraded. I’m quite pleased with what came out of the work done by Encrich Media, which gave us a clean slate to work with in adding on this new feature. And I’m proud of what our small team did to get the zoomer out, especially Al, who was very patient with my many nit-picks. Also, thanks to Tom and John for providing me with their expert advice.

There’s a lot more coming from BestPlaces, some of which I’ll probably share here. It’s fun to be involved with a company doing some big things, and I’m happy to be part of it.

I’m excited to introduce Text WifiPDX, a service to find nearby WiFi hotspots (in Portland):

Three easy steps
1. Create your message in the format Wifi <address>
2. Send the text to 41411
3. Wait for the quick response

This is a feature that has been complete for well over a year. When my hard-wired WiFi brain isn’t working, I’ve been able to text in and find hotspots. The problem was finding the right texting number.

Short codes are a long shot

To get a number like 41411, I would have had to go through the short code bureacracy. It’s a lot of money and even getting a short code doesn’t insure that I’d be able to have my short code usable by every mobile provider.

I first found a site that provided keywords with 2-way SMS. I sent a message with my keyword (wifi) to a UK telephone number. Then, it forwarded my message to a web page, returning the reply in a text message. It was exactly what I wanted and worked as a personal proof of concept. I’d have never asked the public to text the UK, so it wasn’t a real solution.

Then my friend John and I worked on getting an open source SMS gateway working. For awhile, John had it running in his San Francisco apartment. With a 503 number, this might have worked fine.

TextMarks to the rescue

Luckily I waited, because John found TextMarks, a site that provides the same service as my original UK site, but with a short code, 41411.

Check it out, Portlanders, and let me know what you think.

Yesterday morning we walked down to Crema for a pastry, some coffee, and the Sunday New York Times. I knew there was a profile of Bert, the head researcher for BestPlaces. I didn’t know it would be plastered across the front page of the real estate section. Pretty cool.

The article was a pretty good overview of what we do at BestPlaces and has some pretty glowing quotes. I hadn’t heard this story about how Charlottesville reacted to being named the Best Place to Live in 2004:

The president of the chamber was so proud, Ms. Uriss said, that she had bumper stickers made up that proclaimed, “We’re the No. 1 City in America.”

They’ve slipped to number 17 this year, after their housing prices doubled.

“I guess we’ll have a lot of bumper stickers left over,” she said.

I’ve been ruminating for awhile, years really, about how important programmers are to the Web. This thought on the blog software WordPress is part of an overall manifesto encouraging coders to be People’s Programmers. If you’d like to see this manifesto make its way to the masses, consider voting for it here.

The stuff that People’s Programmers put out gives power to non-technical people. The software behind Wikipedia has helped thousands of scholars share their knowledge. WordPress has done the same by making it pretty easy to set up a blog. More voices is better than fewer voices.

WordPress was hardly the first blogging software. Blogger and Moveable Type have been around nearly a decade. When I first starting writing about People’s Programmers, back in 2001, I even mentioned some other software, GreyMatter, that has now been forgotten by most.

WordPress is special in that, along with empowering the non-technical, it also teaches some to be technical. Wordpress creates programmers. Beyond that, it creates People’s Programmers.

Many would never have a blog if WordPress didn’t exist. A few of those would never have tried to program if they hadn’t used WordPress. With Plugins, Themes, and Widgets, WordPress offers many ways to hack away at your blog software. People’s Programmers have been born from a program written by People’s Programmers. The stuff the plugin-makers write inspires others to learn a little PHP.

To put it in slightly technical terms, WordPress has created recursive People’s Programmers. If the infinite loop of helping others to inspire others to help others continues, we’ll all be better for it.

Help me keep the cycle going by encouraging the technical to Be People’s Programmers.

A project I worked on last year for AARP Magazine has been nominated in the Uses of Interactivity category by Media Industry Newsletter.

It’s a BestPlaces tool that takes your preferences and finds your top ten locations. Since it’s focused on retirement, it has a few questions that might not be for everybody, but check it out anyway.

The snazzy look and feel was created by Alliant Studios. They did some great work, which I have to think is part of why it drew attention.

I’m also pleased for my friends at AARP, who worked hard to make sure the final product matched their vision. It’s dead simple, fun, and useful. That’s my kind of project, and I’m happy to see it recognized.

It seems that even though there are more hotspots than ever in Portland, people still want to find the closest, best WiFi. I get several calls a week from people who think I’m MetroFi, the blanket WiFi company.

It’s smalltime traffic, but it’s still great growth. It’s two times July’s numbers and has me optimistic about continuing to build a useful site.

In the meantime, some popular spots:

• The Press Club
• The Waypost
• Muddy Waters Coffeehouse

I haven’t been to any of these. I’ll have to try them out.