Non-Profit Tech Blog

Sorry, no pics yet but soon very soon I promise… There’s an interesting movie I shot from the back of a scooter as we traveled through the hills of Da Lat, Vietnam visiting ethnic people that were being helped (and , being proselytized to) by Catholic nuns. I’m always amazed by the sheer tenacity of people willing to take 125cc motorbikes into the toughest terrain. I saw multiple motorbike accidents while I was there, ugh. As a political aside, I always love to make kind fun of my libertarian friends who I frequently invite to Southeast Asia. “No helmet laws, hardly any police, all rules made to be broken and nobody has any insurance. You’ll love it there!” When libertarian reality hits the road…Hehe.

Anyway, some housekeeping — the blog has been moved to WordPress 2.1.1 and the comments section has been revived. The ONLY thing you have to do to make a comment on this blog is just do a little math. Posting will start up soon — I just have to adjust to the time zone difference first and the temperature differential. It’s 50 degrees cooler in New York than in Vietnam and it’s snowing right now — double ugh.

Oh yes, the Pligg RSS import of the nptech feed is working QUITE nicely now. You should check it out! Make sure to click on the unpublished tab to see the latest links. So… let’s get started on moving the Pligg elsewhere. I’d like to move it to nptech.info but it seems that there’s going to be nobody home doing server upkeep at the site. This is why we should NOT do a free site. Generally speaking, I do NOT recommend free web sites for other nonprofits. I know I don’t do that for my organization, I don’t see why that piece of advice doesn’t apply to nptech.info.

So here’s my recommendation, we MOVE the site to a good host that is very responsive and has great customer support and is cheap. I already have such a host in mind, nexcess.net. This blog is hosted on their servers. They’re pretty darn fantastic and I have IMs for their support staff. How killer is that? As for initial costs, I’ll fund the first year. I’ll also set up a Google Adsense account for the site to ensure it pays for itself over time. However, we need to ensure all the basic username/password combos are in multiple people’s hands so that a) I can leave the project if need be after the first year and b) ensure community participation. If people are interested in doing a drupal/pligg combo, we could do that. There’s no single sign-on for the two and building one is WAY out of scope for nptech.info.

I’m thinking the site should have some basic static pages, the pligg and writing the enhanced RSS feed in PHP. Any other suggestions?