Rashmi Sinha posts about How Feature Creep Ruined The Moleskine City Notebooks. I didn’t read the title of the post until after I attempted to post a comment, which at this time is throwing a database error, so…

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?

Somebody’s been Googling the heck out of me this past week, by name and in combination with things like my employer’s name, and the term livejournal, and a few phrases that are pretty easily pulled out of my various public profiles. I keep a pretty small “googleprint” (which is my phrase for a person’s visibility on Google) mainly because most of my blogging activity is done behind either a pen name or my nickname, and I’m no longer active on message boards and the like where my name might appear.

Wonder what’s up with all the searches?

Sitting on line at PDX, waiting to head down to the Bay Area for WordCamp. We’ll see how this goes. Could be a fun weekend. Probably won’t get to WordCamp until just before noon, which sucks, but there’s no good early flights on Saturdays. I’m sure there will be plenty of geeking left over.

See the problem with this whole blog thing is that I cannot be satisfied with templates. Oh, I’m ahppy to use them, and I really don’t customize them too much – it’s just the little things really. All these little things make it hard for me to start this new blog since I keep running into thing I need to tweak, but haven’t gotten around to changing yet.

Examples?

• I need to make the header clickable to return home – but oh yeah, this template has those cool tabs.
• I need to write the about page
• I need to upload my gotta-have extensions to this wordpress install and activate those few I use. Do I really care about stats for this blog? Of course I do. Which means I need to get serious about fleshing out the META tags, etc.
• No Google ads on this site. This one is just for talking.
• I need to change the index page at Markalope.com to be a real index page or have it default to this blog. That’s kind of a tweaky thing that’s more of a pain than it should be, And I could have avoided it by just installing WP to the right freakin directory in the first place.
• I need to decide what my mission is with this thing and generate some content.

Aren’t new blogs a fun read? What a waste of bandwidth, posting all this shizz when it all should have been nailed before the thing went live.

This is the first post on this new blog. I’m using this as an outlet for topics, discussion and interaction with a larger community of blogger than I have been interacting with up to now. I’ve been online journaling (on Livejournal) since 2001, and active on the Internet and various BBSes since the mid-80’s. Two years ago, I launched a “real” blog focused on my neighborhood called The Multnomah Villager. I am one of those hyper-local bloggers that are often dismissed by “the in crowd” as one of the 100-hits-a-day bloggers. Personally, I’m OK with my level of traffic (which is more like 200 hits per day, thanks) and my place within the tangle of online resources. I originally launched the Villager blog on Blogger, but soon outgrew the current functionality (it’s better now) and after a few months of reading and waffling, moved the blog onto Wordpress. The transition to Wordpress has forced me to update my knowledge of markup language, and introduced me to working in CSS. I am not a programmer, but I enjoy tweaking.

I’d like to become more knowledgeable about the Wordpress platform, as I’m now using it with a couple of work projects, in my daily life as Director of Operations for the Portland, OR studio of Compass Rose Media, a Santa Cruz based interactive/video firm. I’d like to become more active, or at least nominally active, in the larger community of bloggers and web producers/creators. To that end, I decided to head down to San Francsisco later this month for WordCamp. I might as well throw myself headfirst into a group of 250 power users. I’m introverted like that.

That’s my intro.