The Joy of Basic Overviews!

Three new basic overviews came out recently - one on social bookmarking tools like Del.icio.us, a step-by-step tutorial on using RSS readers, and a look at the issue of image blocking in email browsers. It feels like there's been more focus on these basic overviews lately - a great trend! Keep them coming!

In the meantime, check these out...

An Introduction to Tagging (Beth's Blog and NTEN)
A terrific introduction to social bookmarking in general and De.licio.us in particular - and a great example of the power of screencasting.

Why Nonprofit Managers Must Use RSS ... And How to Start (DemocracyinAction)
Another fabulous tutorial - this one looking at why you would use an RSS reader to aggregate blogs, news, and searches, with step-by-step instructions as to how to go about it

Image Blocking in Email Clients: Current Conditions and Best Practices (Campaign Monitor)
A useful summary of the latest word about email browsers blocking images, and how you can take this into account when sending emails. It includes a chart summarizing common email browsers' support for images

Two New Articles: Online Payment Processing and Data Integration

Okay, I've been a bad blogger. I admit it. I've been spending way too much time moving into our new house (more on that soon), but in the meantime, we've put up two new articles that I'm really proud of....

A Few Good Online Payment Multitaskers breaks down the world of payment processing options for those who want to accept not just donations, or not just event or item or membership payments, but several of those things. It walks through some of the same tools we looked at in our Donation Report, but also goes into much more details about "roll-your-own" options involving integrating your own payment gateway.

And we have An Introduction to Integrating Constituent Data: Three Basic Approaches. This is a walkthrough of the first decision you need to make when looking to integrate data - do you want to integrate by hand via manual imports and exports? Or buy an integrated package? Or use an automated connector to programmatically integrate? There's a number of tradeoffs between these options, and we lay them out to help you decide.

And I promise, I'm now back on the blogging bandwagon, and am in fact thinking through some interesting new directions for this blog. Stay tuned!