Idealware gets the nod from the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal Online on Monday included a section on nonprofit technology resources, which included a nice mention of Idealware. Check it out!

And thanks to NTEN, who organized the section.

Resource Roundup 11/30

Okay, I'm behind again, but here's a few of the good software resources out within the last couple of weeks. More soon!

Don't Live in Fear Online--Let Users Post Comments! (FrogLoop)
A thoughtful look at the benefits of allowing users to comment online - primarily, the ability to frame the debate.

Online Video Publishing And Sharing: A Mini-Guide (Kolabora)
Another great guide from Kolabora, and greatly needed: a quick guide to features that are offered by online video services like YouTube and Google Video (and another 15 services)

Use of Digital Communications in UK Arts Organizations (London Calling)
From back in June, this is an very interesting report from a survey of UK arts organizations use of and issues with digital communication methods. The survey is very well done, and the results interesting though the report has some of the worse cases of info-porn I've ever seen (the key goes on the same page as the chart, folks! I don't care if it messes with your aesthetics!)

Reasons for Blogging (CK's Blog)
This is a somewhat interesting survey - of the reasons that people were blogging - made really interesting by the beautiful, graphic method of summarizing them. I admit it - I'm a graphic design junkie.

Rethinking "Internet for Everyone" & Social Networking (CTC VISTA Project Digest)
An interesting from-the-front-lines viewpoint - from a VISTA staffer - about the gap between tools that techies find "easy to use" and what's needed for nonprofit staff and constituents who have little experience with software or the internet.

The Sweet 16: Principles for Building a Successful Internet Business (LED Digest)
This doesn't have anything directly to do with nonprofits... but is a tremendous article about the realities of starting and running an organizaiton.

Communication Technologies -- A Decision Tree for Users (How To Save the World)
A detailed decision tree that walks through some questions to ask yourself to help decide whether you should be using email, IM, groupware, a wiki, etc. A great starting place.

The Interface is the System

From the Adaptive Path blog, a great story that cuts to the heart about the importance of careful graphic and functional design:

My family is participating in the Guest at Your Table again this year. It’s a program that collects money for social justice causes. The cardboard box that you put money into sits on your dinner table, and on one side of the box is a panel about people not having access to clean drinking water. As I explained this to my six-year-old daughter, her response was, “Wow, we’re so lucky to have faucets!” For her, the whole system of reservoirs, pipes, plumbing, sewage treatment, etc. was completely summarized by the one visible part of the system: the faucets.

How often this is true, especially with digital products. What users physically experience represents the system to them, and how it works. The interface is the system. You can have the greatest interaction design or information architecture in the world, but wrapped in crappy industrial or visual design with poor affordances, the entire system is perceived to be bad.

“The interface is the system.” This is so true, and something we struggle with in the nonprofit space. I would go even farther than these guys have: for the many applications that are trying to be mainstream, it doesn’t matter how incredibly nifty the functionality is. If the 60 year old, non-technical director of development can’t figure out how to use it - in fact, if she isn’t inspired to use it because it’s easy and un-intimidating looking – the functionality might as well not exist.

Happy Birthday to Us

It’s been a year since we made it official: one year ago today, Idealware both officially became a nonprofit corporation and launched our Online Donation Tools report. We’ve come a long way since…. (ah, I can hear the flashback music now. Or maybe it’s montage music):

• We published the Seven Blogging Tools Compared report and another eighteen articles about nonprofit software
• More than 6000 people have registered to view the Online Donation Tools report, and 2700 have signed up for our monthly eNewsletter
• Back in Nov 2005, we getting about 100 visits a day to our website. Now it’s more like 600 visits a day.
• 63 different people have contributed their expertise, time, and/or writing skills to Idealware reports and articles
• We completed a tremendously successful webinar series, in partnership with NTEN
• We kicked off our donation campaign, and raised about $2200 in individual donations… almost entirely in $10 increments.

It’s a pretty amazing thing: last year, Idealware was pretty much me and few friends with an idea. Now it’s a community which is - hopefully - beginning to make a real difference in the software information available to nonprofits. I can’t say enough to thank all of you who have read our articles, contributed your knowledge, made a donation, told others about us, or are just out there routing for Idealware. It humbles me and touches me to be part of what Idealware has become.

Here’s to many more years to come.

Tracking an Existing Blogger Feed with Feedburner

I just switched our RSS feed over to be tracked through FeedBurner (Stats! Woohoo! You have no idea what a stats junkie I am), and it was surprisingly easy, though you wouldn’t know it from the complete lack of any kind of useful Google-able help on the subject. So for anyone out there trying to do the same, here’s how to go about it.

I realized after writing this up that there's a lot of assumptions involved. Namely, this assumes that you're publishing your Blogger blog via FTP to a web server you have some control over (i.e. your blog shows up at www.yoururl.com/blog rather than at blogspot). And then it assumes that you have access to CPanel for your webserver, or can otherwise setup a temporary redirect. The process requires no particular tech skills, though it's a bit conceptually techie.

So just to start with, the goal here is to give anyone requesting the Idealware feed a FeedBurner URL, so FeedBurner can track visits, clicks, etc. If you already have a RSS feed, you need a way to redirect the URL for that feed to Feedburner, so you can track all your subscribers without making people manually switch feeds. Conceptually, this process does exactly that. However, we can’t just redirect from the original URL to the FeedBurner URL, because, well, the FeedBurner URL is looking at the original URL for the content of the feed. So Feedburner looks to your original URL, which looks to FeedBurner, which looks to your original URL… infinite loop. So instead, we’re going to setup a second feed URL which doesn’t do anything but provide the content.

Note that if you don’t have any feed subscribers yet, you don’t need to do all this – you can just create the Feedburner feed and put that in as your feed option for new subscribers, rather than fool around with redirects.

So here are the steps:

1. In Blogger, change the name of your feed so that it is posted to a new URL. To do this, go to Settings -> Site Feed, and change the Site Feed Filename and Site Feed URL. My filename was originally atom.xml and my URL was http://www.idealware.org/blog/atom.xml; I changed them to atom_fb.xml and http://www.idealware.org/blog/atom_fb.xml. It doesn’t matter what you change them to as long as it’s different and the file name matches the URL. Remember what your old URL was.
2. In Feedburner, create a Feedburner feed for this new URL. So just paste the URL from above into the giant Ready to Burn Your Feed field on the homepage. Or if you’ve already setup a feed, you can change the URL for the original feed by clicking Edit Feed Details on the top of your dashboard.
3. Now all there is to do is to redirect from your old URL to the Feedburner URL, with the standard temporary redirect. To do this through CPanel (a utility offered by a lot of shared web hosts), go to Manage Redirects. Type in your old URL in the field on the left (mine was http://www.idealware.org/blog/atom.xml); type in the Feedburner URL after the arrow (mine was http://feeds.feedburner.com/idealware). Click Add.
4. Done! Enjoy the glut of statistics on your feed. Wohoo!

Note that people say it’s not optimal for search engine optimization to create temporary redirects like this (though search engines aren’t doing much with RSS feeds now anyway). I think it’s highly preferable, however, to creating a permanent redirect which irrevocably links your public feed to FeedBurner, which is the only other option on most shared webhosts.

Online Seminar: Comparing Joomla, Drupal, and Plone

Are you investigating open source content management systems for your organization's website? If so, don't miss our online seminar WEDNESDAY NOV 15, at 11:00 Pacific – Comparing Open Source CMSs: Joomla, Drupal, and Plone.

Nonprofit experts – Ryan Ozimek, David Geilhufe, and Patrick Shaw - will demo how each CMS works from both the site visitor's and administrator's perspective, and we'll talk about the strengths and drawbacks of each.

The online seminar is $60 for NTEN members or Idealware eNews subscribers; it's $100 otherwise. Register now on the NTEN website >

Resource Roundup 11/13

A selection of nonprofit-applicable software news and articles from the last couple weeks....

Whiteboarding Tools and Technology Miniguide (Kolabora)
Another great mini-guide from Kolabora - this one on tools that allow you to show applications and whiteboard remotely. It provides an overview of typical features and then mini-reviews of 18 different tools.

The Center for Disease Control's Second Life (Spare Change)
A terrific, detailed case study about the Center for Disease Control's involvement in the online virtual world Second Life, with an emphasis on the outreach potential and the organizational politics of ventures like these.

Donor Management Software Comparison (TechSoup)
TechSoup talks to eight donor management database vendors and summarizes what they had to say in a useful matrix.

The State of Open Source software for Nonprofits (NetSquared)
NetSquared has released (okay, a little belatedly) a podcast of the State of Open Source panel from their conference in the spring.

Social Bookmarking Showdown (Wired)
A useful set of reviews of the top social bookmarking software, with overviews, ratings, and detailed reviews.

Web-Conferencing Tools: Right for You? (TechSoup)
A broad overview of a number of web-conferencing tools, including information on pricing and a few features.

Beta Lauch of ChipIn, a fundraising widget for blogs (ChipIn)
An interesting new service that allows you to integrate a paypal donation feature with a thermometer graphic onto your blog or website.

A Roundup of Widgets (Beth's Blog)
Beth Kanter experiments with widgets - prepackaged functionalites that you can add to your blog (to add a poll, say, or pull in Flickr images) - and reports back