I know what you’re saying – “Jeez – who doesn’t know this stuff?!” but  remember I’m a designer and project manager with a long association with computers. I haven’t been able to call myself a programmer since my old BASIC days back in the early80s.  I am however, a bit of an experienced Filemaker Pro developer, and again I am surprised that a lot of that experience (“user friendly” as it is) has given me a good basis to move on up to PHP/MySQL. Until now, my PHP experience has consisted of changing values in Wordpress themes etc. My SQL experience is from the PHPMyAdmin side only, not creating a database or interacting with it in any meaningful way.

So am I planning to code Project X myself then? Hell no. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’ve decided that I’m going to develop the database as a first draft, and then toss some money at one of my “real” developer friends to audit it. Then I’ll stake a stab at the PHP. For some reason, I have a harder time getting my head around PHP than the concepts in SQL, but that’s just me, right now.

I have to say though, that in my experience, Peachpit Press books rock. They’re certainly not the ultimate reference, but their Quickstart Guides have played a very important part in my career up to now. I find them to be a thorough “quick look” at a topic, providing just enough knowledge to feel like I’m informed about a piece of software and know whether or not to explore more. YMMV.

• This is a game-like entertainment thing which is targeted at “the general public”
• I am specifically using search-bait topics in the content of the application such as celebrity names, popular movies, cultural references and other things that “the masses” look for on the Web
• Hopefully this will have a social component with certain community features. I use “social” in the “Web 2.0″ sense, and not the altruistic service-towards-society sense.
• I’d like to do as much of this as possible myself, but it is WAY past my abilities in terms of coding – on both the display and the backend.

This started out as an idea for a book, but was recently resurrected as a web application during a flight to Maui last week. After discussing the basic structure and goals with my wife, we brainstormed a bit and both agreed that this book idea would work well as as web “thing”. So now, I am in the process of figuring out how to get it built, launched and marketed, all the while revealing as little as possible about the idea and spending as little money as possible doing it.

I am a producer/project manager in my real life, so you’d think I’d be able to get a project brief written and put a team together to get this done the right way. That’s the process I’m working on now. I’m also debating how much money I’m willing to invest for things such as the proper coding of the PHP/MySQL bits.  That’s actually the easy part – it’s just decisions. So far, the hard part of all this is taking a step back and making sure that I don’t get do excited about the idea that I try to cobble something together too quickly, or put something out there on the Web that is not bomb-proof and polished. It’s far too easy these days, to be honest, to create sites and applications and loose them on the world. The discipline to fully prepare and make sure something is ready for prime time is going to be a continual struggle.

The good news is – almost all of the URLs I had brainstormed for this site are available. Even my first choice MAY become available in November, since it’s currently sitting dead, I’m hoping to snarf it when it comes up for renewal – it’s such a common phrase that I’m totally surprised it isn’t some really active URL, but no.

I’m going to blog about this process, but I’m not including any details about the specific app or the URLs or whatever until things are nailed down. I’ll be tracking the general process of getting something built though. Let’s see how it goes.

My comment as follows:

I see your point, although I also see how a person might choose one of these products to keep a travel journal or something for the city in question, which seems to be an ideal use for this sort of product.

However -

I think the larger message here is feature creep, and the propensity of designers and product managers to assume that a product, already popular, would be even MORE popular and well-loved if it did… well.. everything.

Note that this does not mean doing everything well.

Simplicity, and excellence of a chosen set of functions, should be enough of a goal.

This has particular resonance for me at this time, since I am in the process of developing a web app with a very simple premise. It is very easy to see how the design of this nascent application of mine could get creepy. A certain well-known word processor comes to mind.

Random thoughts associated with this idea:

The iPod. Simplicity of function, but getting creepy. Games?