It seems as though everywhere I go, people are trying to figure out how to make sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, etc. work for them – which is not a bad thing. If you see a tool that you think may be able to assist you in succeeding in your endeavors, then by all means experiement, play with it, discover what does and doesn’t work for you.

I just saw a news clip of a guy that has figured out how to make social networking sites work for him. I found his perspective to be very insightful and maybe you will too.

Check it out below…

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Just something for your reading pleasure that will hopefully assist you in excelling in your personal and professional pursuits. I personally found it very enlightening.

Click here to download this free ebook.

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Just saw an interesting video about implementing Drupal as the CMS for the WhiteHouse.gov site. For those that are not familiar with Drupal, it is an open-source content management system (CMS). Basically, it is a free tool that is used to mangage the content on websites, without having to know a whole lot about HTML, Javascript, etc. It’s good to have some knowledge of these things, but the idea is to be able to log in, type your content or upload your pictures, and see your results in an organized manner on your website. WordPress and Joomla are a couple of the other popular open source CMS’s.

Nevertheless, below is the video for you to view…

White House New Media Team on Using Drupal from Development Seed on Vimeo.

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UX Magazine published an interview they did with David Heinemeier Hansson (author of Ruby on Rails programming framework, partner in the company 37Signals – the creators of Basecamp, Highrise, Campfire, and Backpack).  I found this article to be very insightful, not only from a application develpment standpoint, but also concerning making good business decisions.  However, there was one thing that stood out to me and that was the importance of making applications simple.

Now how many applications do you come across that are really simple and easy to learn/use?  As a developer, its easy to get caught up in making our applications so flexible and so feature rich, trying to think of every possible scenario and everything that a user may want to see it do – resulting in a very complicated system that is hard to support.

But how about taking a different approach?  What if we started with a few key features and really developed those features well?  How do you think users would respond?  There may be some things they want to see the application do (and I think it is worth it to listen to them), but I think they would continue to use it more and even get others to use it as well – resulting in a win-win situation for the developer and the user.

Click here to read the interview.  It is definately worth it.

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