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Programming
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10.24.07Top 10 Things You Should Know About If You’re a Nonprofit Tech ConsultantFrom time to time, I get requests to do CTO or project management jobs on a consulting basis. I can't do them. I'm already the Executive Director of socialmarkets. However, I'd love to pass the buck (and the bucks) to my readers. Before I just open up my recommendations to anyone though, I have to do a pretty thorough check on people who would be interested. What follows is my top 10 list of things you should know and practice as a nonprofit technology consultant for web application development. Continue Reading...
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10.16.07Convio and Kintera open their APIs but befuddles codersConvio has announced its new open API. They have the documentation up too just like Kintera. It's very good news so I'm not going to bother too much with what was said yesterday but with the actual experience of trying to participate in the open API programs of Kintera or Convio. I'm going to say it right now -- too many bloggers who talk about open APIs are unwilling or unable to research the documentation and I'm one of them. Today, I'm going to address that. Continue Reading...
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03.28.07Good job, Housing Works!Wow! At least one nonprofit gets it! Housing Works is looking for a Ruby on Rails developer and they posted it on 37signals.com too! Here's a brief excerpt: Looking for an individual or company who can help us put the finishing touches on our online Thrift Shop Point of Sale system built in Ruby on Rails. Would be looking for someone with extensive rails experience and experience with point of sale or e-commerce. Ideally this arrangement would also include some sort of second level support agreement where the company or individual could be called upon for bug fixes when the internal team ...
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03.01.07Meditation upon watching a co-worker faxSo I'm watching a co-worker fax documents hour after hour to other nonprofits. She works for our eviction prevention unit. That unit is responsible for serving 700 clients with emergency rental assistance. It's a one-shot deal that allows people to avoid the shelter system here in New York by paying their rental arrears. However, in order to pay for people's rent, my org has to fax our nonprofit partners with case management files just to see if they can pay our client's rental arrears. Ok, so you'd think the easy answer is... why not e-mail the document to them? They ...
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09.11.06Social Networking for non-profitsBack from vacation! I've been itching to discuss an article by Paul Lamb that appeared on News.com recently. (I'm the guy responsible for its current position in the nptech tag stream mainly because I got tired of seeing Techsoup in the stream an umpteen number of times...) Paul makes a valid point that social networking is not for the typical nonprofit audience, i.e. young and digitally savvy. But how can social networking work for social service nonprofits? More after the jump... Continue Reading...
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08.29.06Dapper’s first results with nonprofit databasesOK, so I'm trying to use Dapper with all sorts of different non-profit databases. My stated goal is to generate a Google maps mashup out of databases built by non-profit organizations. Basically, the problem I'm having with Dapper is that many of these databases don't use a single query URL like Google to return a result from or worse, they use a second script to create details or worst, their detail pages are generated as static HTML pages. It looks like the only way to really use Dapper is to be a developer. Next step for me: Creating another layer ...
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07.24.06issuelab.com – a great resource for the non-profit communityLast week, Gabi Fitz from issuelab.com contacted me asking if I would take a look at issuelab.com. I get these offers from time to time but I don't always follow up but what I saw just really impressed me. What you get when you go to the site is an online library of research materials from numerous non-profits. I had a lot of questions though because when I referred the site to my non-profit's staff members responsible for research materials they talked about issues of the time it would take to post to the site. It would be yet another ...
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04.09.06How to create a REST request for Alexa Web Information Services in RubyHi all, I've been busy creating the beginnings of my super-duper Real-Time Popularity Engine and instead of doing it in PHP (seems like the OSS version of vbscript - hehe), I decided to do it in Ruby on Rails. The code sample posted after the jump is DEFINITELY not using the Rails framework, it's designed for people to grok the code in a straightforward way so they can properly create methods around it. The code has lots of comments but if you have questions, just post a comment so that others can participate. Continue Reading...
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03.06.06Mission aligned!Today was one of those rare but glorious days in the life of this IT director where there was a direct connection between the mission of the non-profit org and IT itself. I was tasked with creating an application that would allow homeless clients to call a special hotline that would in turn connect the clients with roaming support staff. These clients need help because they have been denied shelter and are basically on the streets for the duration. Turnaround time was ASAP. You know what this means... It's a job for the magic IVR! Unfortunately, my org doesn't have enough ...
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