Where's the banana?

A nice side effect of not having net access is that I've been reading a ton of business books. One that has particularly stood out is Seth Godin's excellent The Big Red Fez. He describes a situation where (and I may remember this wrongly) a monkey in a big red fez is in an experiment. The monkey needs to navigate a series of rooms, and to get him going the researchers put a banana in each room. So, the first thing the monkey looks for in each room is the banana.

Now, Seth likens this situation to web surfers; the first thing they look for when they land on your page is the banana. Take Google for instance - the banana is right in the middle (it's the search box) which probably goes a long way towards explaining it's dominance of the search market. Seth uses example websites to point out all the things that distract users away from the banana and muddle up your site. Excellent reading, and invaluable advice IMHO. It certainly made me rethink my approach to MLTA, so much so that I have almost completely redesigned the page structure of the site so that you can't miss the banana. Thanks Seth :)

Still disconnected ...

But no longer homeless. We have found a nice townhouse and my office is setup. Just waiting on Internode to get my connection sorted out. They quote 7-10 days, which unfortunately means that I'll be in New Zealand when it gets connected. Hopefully when I get back, everything will be back to normal and MLTA and Idea #2 can get back into full swing.

I have got the ball rolling with graphics for MLTA, and have also done a fair whack of design work for the site. I'm just about to roll up my sleeves and start some code, but will need net access for some parts. I'm also a bit worried about my source code, as I am unable to use my server's version control through the bluetooth connection as it only allows port 80 it seems. On the flip side, buying a new phone and setting it up for the web will let me test "MLTA for internet-enabled phones", which was never something I had planned but will be an excellent addition.

Disconnected

Wow. We've been without internet access for over a week now and it sucks. I'm curently Bluetooth-ing my laptop and phone together so we can check email, etc., and I'm also sneakng in this post, but with a paltry 300Mb of bandwidth per month, we can't do much else :(

Development is on-again off-again as we're trying to find somewhere more permanent to live, as well as it being difficult to develop without net access. MLTA can move along a bit, but idea #2 really needs the net for research and reference, so it's stalled a bit. I've had some good ideas for it, but without net access to validate them it's pointless investing time. The graphics are almost done for it, but again are on hold until we can get full broadband access again.