Appropedia Blogs

Hi out there in Appropedia Land!

This is the first Appropedia blog post I've written since the site has gone semi-live. I wrote and deleted several test blogs where I was messing around with formatting extensions. But now it's time to actually talk to all y'all! (That's my fake Southern US accent...I travel to Houston now and then, and the waitresses talk like that there, but I think they are really just doing it because they can tell I'm from out of town.)

Well, we decided to add Forums and Blogs to Appropedia for various reasons that you can find at the Forum FAQ. I lobbied hard for Drupal, since some friends are using it and I thought it looked fairly easy to use, and pretty powerful. Good news: I was right! Bad news: Now the hard part is figuring out what, precisely, we want to do! There are a zillion things to choose from, and half a zillion ways to do each one.

That's the Shampoo and Toothpaste comparison. Whenever I go to the grocery store looking for shampoo or toothpaste, I truly experience an embarrassment of riches. There are many more choices than I want to deal with. Instead of 300 choices, I want maybe 5. Then I can feel like I exercised my powers of selection. I believe there are studies that show having too many choices can be as stressful as not having any.

That must be an overstatement! Having too many choices of laundry detergent and cat food are not as bad as having no good choices for how to make a living, or choosing whether to buy food for your kids or medicine for your spouse.

Like I said: Drupal is an embarrassment of riches. I hope that we can use these riches to build a useful tool for collaboration among the community of visionaries who are working to increase the choices and opportunities available in the developing world. If you're part of that community, and you have a desired features, or a complaint, or even just a "Gee, it would really be cool if..." suggestion, we would really appreciate it if you would drop us a note here on the feedback forum. We want this site to serve you, and with the power of these tools, we can probably get something up fairly quickly!

Thanks for stopping by!