Blogs

I am going to offer you advice about how to run an online community for an alumni association: simplify. Complexity is intoxicating, but simplicity is useful.

I set up an alumni association website, isu-usa.org, to have ISU alumni share their contact info with each other. Our mother institution, ISU, had set up a site in 2007 to do this, but... let's say... that... it is not the most useful... thing. (See that? Restraint. /twitch)

My initial take on setting up isu-usa.org profiles was to request the same data that the ISU site requested. Add to that a request from an alumna to also share our educational backgrounds, and ISU*USA profiles collected data from 42 fields. (Fields such as first name, last name, email address, etc.)

I like living in Lowell. I really do. But I'm accustomed to living here now and I rarely look around. The buildings are less... exotic. I mean, they're not strange or different anymore, or otherwise worthy of notice. Each building, each street, each canal is now just an unnoticed landmark on my way to and from work or the grocery store or the train station. What a shame.

I suffer from a disease known as localitis.

This disease is not terminal. If the person who has contracted the disease can not cure himself simply by concentrating more, then external remedies are required. Specifically, entertaining a visitor often does the trick.