As you can tell, I haven’t had much time to blog lately. Here are some great links I’ve come across that I thought were worth sharing:
Tagged as:
nptech,
opensource
Blackbaud announced, just in time for AFP, their new product, called BlackbaudNow, in partnership with PayPal. It is a curious service. It is an extremely low-end, low-cost online website/online donation package from a vendor that spends most of its time on the very high-end of the scale.
It is simple. An organization can sign up for a free account, get a 5 page website, including a donation page, about page, etc. Editing a page is basically point and click – it highlights the part of the page you can edit it, and you edit it with a WYSIWYG editor. It’s decently AJAXy, but no, it’s not shiny – at least not my definition of shiny. You have a small number of templates to choose from (which, frankly, aren’t so great looking – I think they dedicated more graphic design time to their branding and pages than they did to the templates.) It’s free, although Blackbaud takes a percentage off the top. People can donate to your organization via Paypal only, and you can track donations in their very simple interface. You can export your donation history into a CSV file, and you can make your reports into PDFs. There are no APIs.
This was developed by the team that Blackbaud acquired when they acquired eTapestry. And, it’s designed to make migration to eTapestry easy – therein, I suspect, is the key. I’m betting this is a loss-leader – a product designed to get people in the door, and when they are chomping at the bit for more (which they will be in about 2 days after they set up their site,) there is a more costly (and profitable) product waiting right around the bend for them.
Small nonprofits – especially those with few or no staff, are always in a particularly challenging place when it comes to finding the best solution for a web presence and online donations. But I don’t think that a tool like this is going to serve very many nonprofits for very long, given its limitations. Of course, people like me, who make our living building websites, and helping facilitate the web presences of organizations, look askance at tools like this, so take what I say with a grain of salt. But I have to admit that this seems to me a bit too much like a gateway drug – get them hooked on free, then move them slowly but surely to much more expensive systems. And in the end, won’t a modest investment (say, $2K or so) on the part of an organization in getting a better web presence going to serve them better in the long run? Heck, I think a Wordpress.com site attached to a Network for Good donation page will serve them better. At least they’ll have a lot more well-designed templates to choose from, and a real CMS engine.
Honestly, I’m underwhelmed by this service, and, in addition, I have a bone to pick with Blackbaud. The online help for BlackbaudNow is powered by the open source software MediaWiki. It is well hidden, but a somewhat savvy MediaWiki user will notice the telltale signs (the URLs are one giveaway.) Of course, proprietary software makers use open source software all the time, that’s not the problem. The problem I have is that they hid it. Why hide the fact that they are using an open source tool to build their online documentation? Not even a small mention on the About page. Did they do any modification to the code to make it work like they wanted to? Did they contribute anything back to the MediaWiki community? At the very least, they could have given credit where credit is due.
Tagged as:
blackbaud,
opensource,
paypal
YouTube is everywhere – you see videos as a common part of websites, and almost everyone has an internet connection with high enough bandwidth to play video. This means that a lot of nonprofits are interested in having video on their sites.
So what does it take, and what considerations should you think about as you embark on adding video to your site?
First, it is almost always a mistake to upload a video to your website without thinking about the ramifications, both in terms of bandwidth, as well as performance. If you have a standard hosting account, or even a VPS (Virtual Private Server) do some back-of-the-envelope calculations to make sure you won’t end up with sticker shock at the end of the month.
Video is very bandwidth intensive. It is not at all difficult to overshoot your bandwidth limitations on your hosting account with one short video on your home page. A client of mine put a short video on their home page after election day, and we had to take it down a week later, or else they would have started to have to pay for extra bandwidth. Take your average traffic for the page you’ll add the video on, and multiply by the size of the video. For instance, if you have a 3MB video, and you get 1,000 visits per day on that page, that’s potentially using 3,000 MB (3 GB) of bandwidth (of course, most people won’t play through the entire video, etc. but that’s the place to start.) And 3 GB of bandwidth for a month will exceed the bandwidth limits of many virtual hosting plans. In terms of performance, lots of people streaming a video from your website can bring a webserver to its knees. If that video is more popular than you expected, you may end up paying for it, both literally and figuratively.
What about putting it somewhere else? YouTube is the easy answer. Google pays the hosting costs, you get easily embeddable video that can be viral, and you can drive traffic from YouTube to your site. But what if it’s not a public video (perhaps you want to provide video for your members only, for instance) or you want to stream live, or use a different format than flash? There are a number of services you can pay for. StreamGuys and Limelight Networks are two examples of companies that can provide that sort of service for you.
Putting video on your website takes both strategic thinking (why are we doing this? What are the goals?) as well as tactical, technical thinking (what’s the best way to get this video to the eyeballs that we want to see it?)
A while ago, I joined a bunch of groups at groups.drupal.org, thinking I’d pick up some interesting ideas, and meet some folks who were doing cool stuff with Drupal. One of the groups I joined (along with “Drupal for Good” and “Drupalchix”) was the PostgreSQL group.
Yesterday, in my RSS feed, this post showed up. It was the suggestion to remove PostgreSQL support from the Drupal core.
I was always aware that Drupal supported PostgreSQL, and I didn’t really have any plans to use it. And there are varied opinions as to it’s usefulness (which I beg to differ on.) But as a long time lover of PostgreSQL, I couldn’t let this drop. And, I’d been looking for a good solid project to get me going in Drupal, so it looks like I found it. So I’ve adopted it.
But, it turns out that with Drupal 7 (the development branch) it’s virtually impossible to install Drupal, and even though I did wrangle an install (all of the right tables seem to show up in the database), it doesn’t actually work, and I can’t yet figure out why. I don’t yet really grok the structure of Drupal, so it feels like sorting through spagetti right now.
There are several core modules with PostgreSQL problems in Drupal 6, so I might actually go back and work on those first, before I can think about tackling what’s wrong with install.php and PostgreSQL.
I’m learning Drupal bit by bit – one of the first tasks was to learn how to make a new theme. It’s one of those things which is actually fairly straightforward-seeming … until you hit a snag. And then it’s opaque.
One thing I learned is that it is incredibly sensitive to typos. One space accidentally inserted between the “<?” and the “php” led to a completely blank page. Ah well. I’m certainly learning what mistakes can lead to what kinds of issues, which is good. Eventually that becomes second nature.
But, in any event, by the end of an hour or so of hacking, I’d turned a template that I found online at Open Web Design into a Drupal template. I felt accomplished! I’m going to do a few more, and see how sophisticated with it I can get.
One thing I ran into (and haven’t been able to solve yet) is that it’s not easy to have navigation that requires more than just the standard <ul><li> tags. Adding <span> tags, for instance (which makes possible some more interesting looking navigation buttons) seems, at least at first, far from trivial.
I’m making a list of little(ish) projects that I want to do – sort of like problems I think I want to know how to solve.
- Drupal and google docs single sign on. There is already a SSO Module for Drupal 5.x, and someone submitted a patch for it, but it’s still up for review. I’d also have to cough up $50/year to get a google account that has the SSO API, but it might be worth it.
- Drupal sidebar connecting with the NPR API – perhaps to provide a targeted news stream?
- Doing a google map mashup of data in Drupal
- Working with getting flickr photostreams to show in Drupal
I’m still looking for a good project to try out in Cake. Unfortunately, the module Drake, which is meant to be a bridge allowing you to run Cake applications within Drupal, seems moribund. There is only a development snapshot for the 5.x branch, and no one seems to be picking it up for 6.x. Sigh. There is, for sure, another whole blog entry about Drupal modules.
Over the past year and a half, I’ve been fulfilling a definitely different role with nonprofit organizations than most times in the past. I’ve been an intermediary, rather than an implementor. In this role, it has been my task to provide advice for organizations around technology choice and vendor selection.
Many times, I narrow down the technology options as a part of the RFP process. I do this based on my knowledge of the options out there, my own opinions about them, and, most importantly, the feature match. For many projects, a wide range of options are possible, and in talking with vendors who specialize in one toolset or another, I’ve been intrigued by the ways in which vendors talk about their chosen tools. For some projects, there is no question that one tool may be better than another. But for a lot of projects, what’s way more important than the tool is the approach of the vendor/developer, and the quality of the work they produce.
And some things surprise me. I am actually still surprised at how many small vendors are still selling their custom CMS. Having written and maintained my own for a few years, I know that the investment is hard to let go of. But in terms of long term sustainability, from my perspective, picking one of the well developed open source CMSs and running with it, can’t be beat. There will be an initial investment of time, but the time savings later, and the added opportunities will almost inevitably outweigh the cost of maintaining and improving (as web technology gets more sophisticated, clients expect more from their websites) your own.
And I guess what’s less surprising is that people are pretty wedded to their toolset, and ready with long lists of arguments as to why theirs is better. I’m sure that when I was doing implementation, I focused some energy on “why my tools are better” (and, actually, I was right and wrong at the time. For instance, I chose perl over php and postgresql over mysql in 1999.) I know that’s just part of the package of being an implementor. Some arguments I can certainly appreciate better than others (the Python vs PHP ones are fun.) But I’m sorry, I’m not going to be convinced that ColdFusion is a platform I should choose. I mean, it doesn’t even have objects! (That’s actually not the most important reason, but the fact that a web development platform that has been around for 13 years still doesn’t have objects is telling.)
And as I think about going back to doing implementation, platform choice is certainly something to ponder. (More on those thoughts in a forthcoming post.)
I changed my Word Press theme, mostly because I was getting a bit tired of the old one, and wanted something really simple. Also, it coincides with a new installation of Drupal for my consulting website, using the same basic template (called “Blueprint“). I’d been working with Drupal for NOSI (we’ve had the site in Drupal for a while now,) but I’d never installed and configured and messed with Drupal from scratch, so I did that.
So far, it’s been largely painless. I’m quite excited about really getting my hands dirty working on some plug ins, or some such, really learning the ins and outs of Drupal. It will be interesting to learn the innards of a CMS. The last time I coded in a CMS was when I was working on the (now dead) perl CMS I wrote many moons ago. So I’m polishing off my PHP skills, and we’ll see where that leads.
I have been thinking about the software tools we call “Management Systems” – like Content Management Systems, Document Management Systems, Learning Management Systems… I’ve also been playing a lot with an open source tool called Elgg, and have also played, in the past, with Crabgrass, another open source … “SNMS”?
What do these tools allow you to do? They allow you to create stand-alone social networks. Think a whitebox version of Ning, or Facebook. Elgg, a LAMP(hp) project, started it’s life as a learning platform with social network features, but has transmorgrified into a social network platform with learning features. It’s definitely a new project, and a very new community (with some huge warts) but it is promising for organizations that want to create private (or public, perhaps) social networks that include groups, discussions, document sharing, bookmarking, blogs and other things.
Crabgrass is written in Ruby on Rails, and has groups, messaging and wikis, among other features. It’s a particularly interesting project, because it has a definite political purpose:
Designed for social movements working for social justice, Crabgrass will consist of tools which allow people to connect, collaborate, and organize in new ways and with increased efficiency. In particular, we aim to help groups to communicate securely, network with other groups, and make decisions in a way that is easy to understand, transparent, and directly democratic. Where traditional social networking is about connecting individuals, Crabgrass is social networking to facilitate network organizing.
In the end, I don’t advocate that organizations build new public social networks in the vast majority of situations – I think they should find the people where they already are. But private social networks have their place, and can provide a compellingly interesting platform for our nonprofit standard “members only” websites. People are getting more and more used to social networks as the vehicle for connecting to others, and this is one way to provide this in a private setting.
The hiatus is over with a short entry about Google Chrome, the new browser from Google that I learned about on the twitterverse while I was stopped at one rest stop or another.
I can’t test it, because my Mac that has a Windows virtual machine is packed. But I will say this: that doesn’t matter. I won’t be downloading it, or trying it, even when they release Mac or Linux versions.
Why so curmudgeonly you ask? It is open source, after all. And it has some cool features.
Yes, it is open source, and I applaud Google for releasing open source software. However, there was an initial brou-haha about the EULA, which initially suggested that everything you type into the browser belongs to Google (talk about All Your Base Belong to Us!) Yes, they changed it, but it made me realize that it is a Bad Idea to put all of my eggs in one basket. Google already knows enough about me (it reads my mail, my feeds, my search history, and a few shared documents, to boot,) I’m certainly not going to add virtually everything else I do (the percent of things I do using a protocol other than http(s) is dwindling by the second.)
If someone releases a “Chrome minus Google” – that is, a version of Chrome with all of the “phone home” code completely eliminated, then I’ll think about using that version, just to see what it’s like. Otherwise, fuggetaboutit.
