The announcement that GuideStar, Charity Navigator and others would be moving away from the 990 form as their primary source for assessing nonprofit performance raised a lot of interesting questions, such as "How will assessments of outcomes be standardized in a way that is not too subjective?" and "What will be required of nonprofits in order to make those assessments?" We'll have a chance to get some preliminary answers to those questions on February 4th, when NTEN will sponsor a phone-in panel discussion with representatives of GuideStar and Charity Navigator, as well as members of the nonprofit community. The panel will be hosted by Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy, and will include:
As my colleague Steve Backman fully explains here, here's been some fallout from this story for Microsoft. First, like Google and Yahoo!, Microsoft operates a search engine in China and submits to the Chinese governments censoring filters. They've kept mum on their feelings about the cyber-attack. Google's analysis of that attack reveals that GMail accounts were hacked and other breaches occurred via security holes in Internet Explorer, versions six and up, that allow a hacker to upload programs and take control of a user's PC. As this information came to light, France and Germany both issued advisories to their citizens that switching to a browser other than Internet Explorer would be prudent. In response, Microsoft has issued a statement recommending that everyone upgrade from Internet Explorer version 6 to version 8, the current release. What Microsoft doesn't mention is that the security flaw exists in versions seven and eight as well as six, so upgrading won't protect you from the threat, although they just released a patch that hopefully will.
So, while their reasoning is suspect, it's nice to see that Microsoft has finally joined the campaign to remove this old, insecure and incompatible with web standards browser.
I have kept Google Wave open in a tab in my browser since the day my account was opened, subscribed to about 15 waves, some of them quite well populated. I haven't seen an update to any of these waves since January 12th, and it was really only one wave that's gotten any updates at all in the past month. I can't give away the invites I have to offer. The conclusion I'm drawing is that, if Google doesn't do something to make the Wave experience more compelling, it's going to go the way of a Simply Red B-Side and fade from memory. As I've said, there is real potential here for something that puts telecommunication, document creation and data mining on a converged platform, and that would be new. But, in it's current state, it's a difficult to use substitute for a sophisticated Wiki. And, while Google was hyping this, Confluence released a new version of their excellent (free for nonprofits) enterprise Wiki that can incorporate (like Wave) Google gadgets. That makes me want to pack up my surfboard.
...or you might. I find that, in a 25 year IT career that has always included a percentage of tech support, human nature is to use the features of an application that we know about, and only go looking for new features when a clearly defined need for one arises. In that scenario, some great functionality might be hiding in plain sight. Here are a few of my favorite "not very well-hidden" secrets. Share yours in the comments.
Google Search Filtering
Have you ever clicked the "Show Options" link on your results page? Do a search for whatever interests you and try it (it's located right under the Google logo). This will add a left navigation bar with some very useful filtering options. Of note, you can narrow to a trendy real-time search buy clicking on "Latest" under "Any Time"; choose a date range,filter out the pages that you've seen, or haven't seen yet - how useful is that for finding that page that you googled last week but didn't save? The funny thing is that Google has an "Advanced Search" screen, which, of course, can do many things that this bar can't (such as searching for public domain media).
Microsoft Outlook Shortcuts
If you use Outlook, you know how simple it is to find your mail and calendar. Other common folders are conveniently placed in your default view. But if you're the slightest bit of a power user, or you work in an environment where users share mailbox folders or use Exchange's Public Folders, than keeping track of all of those folders can get a bit tedious. That's what the Shortcut view is for. Buried below the Mail, Calendar and Task buttons, you can move it up to the visible button list by right-clicking on the bar area (in the lower-left hand corner of Outlook 2003 or 2007's screen) and choosing "Navigation Pane Options". Highlight "Shortcuts" and then click "Move up" enough times to get it in one of the first four positions. Click OK, then click on the "Shortcuts" bar. From here, you can add new shortcuts and, optionally, arrange them in shortcut groups. You can rename the shortcuts with more meaningful titles, so that, if, say, you're monitoring a norther user's inbox, you can give it their name instead of having two folders named "Inbox". One tip: to add shortcuts to a group, right-click on the group title and add from there.
Facebook Friend Lists
Nothing makes Facebook more manageable than Friends Lists, and, with the new security changes, this is more true than ever. If you're like me, your connections on Facebook span every facet of your life, from family to childhood friends to co-workers. Wouldn't it be useful to be able to send links and messages to all of your co-workers but not your friends, or vice-versa? Click on "Friends" from the Facebook menu, then all connections. If you've become a fan of a page or two, you'll see that Facebook has already created two lists for you: Friends and Pages. To make more, scroll through your connection list and click to "Add to List" option to the right. You can create new lists from there, and add friends to multiple lists.
When you share a link, note, video or whatever, you can choose which list to send it to by clicking on the lock icon next to the "Share" button and choosing "Customize".
There Are More
Did you know about these features? Are there other ones that you use that make your use of popular applications and web sites much more manageable? Leave a comment and let us know.
A few months ago, I blogged a bit about Google Wave, and how it might live up to the hype of being the successor to email. Now that I've had a month or so to play with it, I wanted to share my initial reactions. Short story: Google Wave is an odd duck, that takes getting used to. As it is today, it is not that revolutionary -- in fact, it's kind of redundant. The jury is still out.
If you haven't gotten a Wave invite and want to try it, now is the time to query your Twitter and Facebook friends, because invites are being offered and we've passed the initial, competitive "gimme" stage. They should be easier to find if you speak up. And, once you get there (or if you are there and don't know what to do), there are some excellent ways to start learning and playing, which I'll discuss below.
Awkwardness
To put Wave in perspective, I clearly remember my first exposure to email. I bought my first computer in 1987: a Compaq "portable". The thing weighed about 60 pounds, sported a tiny green on black screen, and had two 5 and 1/4 inch floppy drives for applications and storage). Along with the PC, I got a 1200 BPS modem, which allowed me o dial up local bulletin boards. And, as I poked around, I discovered the 1987 version of email: the line editor.
On those early BBSes, emails were sent by typing one line (80 characters, max) of text and hitting "enter". Once "enter" was pressed, that line was sent to the BBS. No correcting typos, no rewriting the sentence. It was a lot like early typewriters, before they added the ability to strike out previously submitted text.
But, regardless of the primitive editing capabilities, email was a revelation. It was a new medium; a form of communication that, while far more awkward than telephone communications, was much more immediate than postal mail. And it wasn't long before more sophisticated interfaces and editors made their way to the bulletin boards.
Google Wave is also, at this point, awkward. To use it, you have to be somewhat self-confident right from the start, as others are potentially watching every letter that you type. And while it's clear that the ability to co-edit and converse about a document in the same place is powerful, it's messy. Even if you get over the sprawling nature of the conversations, which are only minimally better than what you would get with ten to twenty-five people all conversing in one Word document, the lack of navigational tools within each wave is a real weakness.
Redundant?
I'm particularly aware of these faults because I just installed and began using Confluence, a sophisticated, enterprise Wiki (free for nonprofits) at my organization. While we've been told that Wave is the successor to email, Google Docs and, possibly, Sharepoint, I have to say that Confluence does pretty much all of those things and is far more capable. All wikis, at their heart, offer collaborative editing, but the good ones also allow for conversations, plug-ins and automation, just as Google Wave promises. But with a wiki, the canvas is large enough and the tools are there to organize and manage the work and conversation. With Wave, it's awfully cramped, and somewhat primitive in comparison.
Too early to tell?
Of course, we're looking at a preview. The two things that possibly differentiate Wave from a solid wiki are the "inbox" metaphor and the automation capabilities. Waves can come to you, like email, and anyone who has tried to move a group from an email list to a web forum knows how powerful that can be. And Wave's real potential is in how the "bots", server-side components that can interact with the people communicating and collaborating, will integrate the development and conversation with existing data sources. It's still hard to see all of that in this nascent stage. Until then, it's a bit chicken and egg.
Wave starting points
There are lots of good Wave resources popping up, but the best, hands down, is Gina Trapini's Complete Guide, available online for free and in book form soon. Gina's blog is a must read for people who find the types of things I write about interesting.
Once you're on wave, you'll want to find Waves to join, and exactly how you do that is anything but obvious. the trick is to search for a term "such as "nonprofit" or "fundraising" and add the phrase "with:public". A good nonprofit wave to start with is titled, appropriately, "The Nonprofit Technology Wave".
If you haven't gotten a Wave invite and want to, now is the time to query your Twitter and Facebook friends, because invites are being offered and we've passed the initial "gimme" stage. In fact, I have ten or more to share (I'm peterscampbell on most social networks and at Google's email service).
Social networks provide nonprofits with great opportunities to raise awareness, just as they offer individuals more opportunities to be diagnosed with information overload syndrome. To my mind, the value of tools like Twitter and Facebook are not only that they increase my ability to communicate with people, but also that they replace communication models that are less efficient. Prior to social networks, we had Email, phones, Fax and Instant Messaging (IM). Each of these were ideal for one to one communication, and suitable for group messaging, but poor at broadcasting. With Twitter and Facebook, we have broader recipient bases for our messaging. Accordingly, there's also an assumption that we are casual listeners. With so much information hitting those streams, it would be unrealistic to expect anyone to listen 24/7.
Twitter offers, in addition to the casual stream, a person-to-person option called direct messaging. This is handy when you want to share information with a twitter friend that you might not want to broadcast, such as your email address, or a link to a map to your house. You can only direct message someone who is following you -- otherwise, it would be far too easy to abuse. Direct messages have more more in common with old-fashioned IM and EMail than Twitter posts. You can't direct message multiple recipients, and most of us receive direct messages in our email inboxes and/or via SMS, to insure that we don't miss them.
So I took note when a friend on a popular forum posted that his organization was launching a big campaign, and he was looking for a tool that would let him send a direct messages to every one of his followers. This, to me, seems like a bad idea. While I follow a lot of people and organizations on Twitter, I subscribe by email to far fewer mailing lists, limiting that personal contact to the ones that I am most interested in and/or able to support. I follow about 250 organizations on Twitter; I have no care to receive all of their campaign emails. But i trust that, if they are doing something exciting or significant, I'll hear about it. My friends will post a link on Facebook. They'll also retweet it. The power of social media is -- or, at least, should be -- that the interesting and important information gets voted up, and highlighted, based on how it's valued by the recipients, not the sender.
Social networks differ primarily from email and fax in that they are socially-driven messaging. The priority of any particular message can be set by each persons community that they tune into. My friend thinks his campaign is the most important thing coming down the pike, and that he should be able to transcend the casual nature of Twitter conversation in order to let me know about it. And, of course, I think that every campaign that my org trumpets is more important than his. But I think that proper campaign etiquette and strategy is to blast information on the mediums that support that, where your constituents sign up to be individually alerted. If you want to spread the word on Twitter or Facebook, focus on the message, not the media, and let the community carry it for you, if they agree that it's worthy.
Meaningful shared data, like the Miles Per Gallon ratings on new car stickers or the calorie counts on food packaging help us make better choices;
But not all data is as easy to interpret;
Nonprofits have continually been challenged to quantify the conditions that their missions address;
Shared knowledge and metrics will facilitate far better dialog and solutions than our individual efforts have;
The web is a great vehicle for sharing, analyzing and reporting on data;
Therefore, the nonprofit sector should start defining and adopting common data formats that support shared analysis and reporting.
I've made the case before for shared outcomes reporting, which is a big piece of this. Sharing and transparency aren't traditional approaches to our work. Historically, we've siloed our efforts, even to the point where membership-based organizations are guarded about sharing with other members.
The reason that technologists like Marnie and I end up jumping on this bandwagon is that the tech industry has modeled the disfunction of a siloed approach better than most. early computing was an exercise in cognitive dissonance. If you regularly used Lotus 123, Wordperfect and dBase (three of the most popular business applications circa 1989) on your MS-DOS PC, then hitting "/", F7 or "." were the things you needed to know in order to close those applications respectively. For most of my career, I stuck with PCs for home use because I needed compatibility with work, and the Mac operating system, prior to OSX, just couldn't easily provide that.
The tech industry has slowly and painfully progressed towards a model that competes on the sales and services level, but cooperates on the platform side. Applications, across manufacturers and computing platforms, function with similar menus and command sequences. Data formats are more commonly shared. Options are available for saving in popular, often competitive formats (as in Word's "Save As" offering Wordperfect and Lotus formats). The underlying protocols that fuel modern operating systems and applications are far more standardized. Windows, Linux and MacOS all use the same technologies to manage users and directories, network systems and communicate with the world. Microsoft, Google, Apple and others in the software world are embracing open standards and interoperability. This makes me, the customer, much less of an innocent bystander who is constantly sniped by their competitive strategies.
So how does this translate to our social service, advocacy and educational organizations? Far too often, we frame cooperation as the antithesis to competition. That's a common, but crippling mistake. The two can and do coexist in almost every corner of our lives. We need to adopt a "rising tide" philosophy that values the work that we can all do together over the work that we do alone, and have some faith that the sustainable model is an open, collaborative one. Looking at each opportunity to collaborate from the perspective of how it will enhance our ability to accomplish our public-serving goals. And trusting that this won't result in the similarly-focused NGO down the street siphoning off our grants or constituents.
As Marnie is proposing, we need to start discussing and developing data standards that will enable us to interoperate on the level where we can articulate and quantify the needs that our mission-focused organizations address. By jointly assessing and learning from the wealth of information that we, as a community of practice collect, we can be far more effective. We need to use that data to determine our key strategies and best practices. And we have to understand that, as long as we're treating information as competitive data; as long as we're keeping it close to our vests and looking at our peers as strictly competitors, the fallout of this cold war is landing on the people that we're trying to serve. We owe it to them to be better stewards of the information that lifts them out of their disadvantaged conditions.
To break down that tweet a bit, @kanter is the well-known Beth Kanter of Beth's blog. @pearlbear is former Idealware blogger and current contributor Michelle Murrain, and Beth asked us, in the referenced blog post, to dive a bit into internet security and how it contrasts with internet privacy concerns. Michelle's response, offers excellent and concise definitions of security and privacy as they apply to the web, and then sums up with a key distinction: security is a set of tools for protecting systems and information. The sensitivity of that data (and need for privacy) is a matter of policy. So the next question is, once you have your security systems and policies in place, what happens when the the policies are breached?
Craft a Policy that Minimizes Violations
Social media is casual media. The Web 2.0 approach is to present a true face to the world, one that interacts with the public and allows for individuals, with individual tastes and opinions, to share organizational information online. So a strict rule book and mandated wording for your talking points are not going to work.
Your online constituents expect your staff to have a shared understanding of your organization's mission and objectives. But they also expect the CEO, the Marketing Assistant and the volunteer Receptionists to have real names (and real pictures on their profiles); their own online voices; and interests they share that go beyond the corporate script. It's not a matter of venturing too far out of the water -- in fact, that could be as much of a problem as staying too close to the prepared scripts. But the tone that works is the one of a human being sharing their commitment and excitement about the work that they (and you) do.
Expect that the message will reflect individual interpretations and biases. Manage the messaging to the key points, and make clear the areas that shouldn't be discussed in public. Monitor the discussion, and proactively mentor (as opposed to chastising) staff who stray in ways that violate the policy, or seem capable of doing so.
The Case for Transparency
Transparency assumes that multiple voices are being heard; that honest opinions are being shared, and that organizations aren't sweeping the negative issues under the virtual rug. Admittedly, it's a scary idea that your staff, your constituents, and your clients should all be free to represent you. The best practice of corporate communications, for many years, was to run all messaging through Marketing/Communications experts and tightly control what was said. I see two big reasons for doing otherwise:
We no longer have a controlled media.
Controlled messaging worked when opening your own TV or Radio Station was prohibitively expensive. Today, YouTube, Yelp and Video Blogs are TV Stations. Twitter and Facebook Status are radio stations. The investment cost to speak your mind to a public audience has just about vanished.
We make more mistakes by under-communicating than we do by over-communicating.
Is the importance of hiding something worth the cost of looking like you have something to hide? At the peak of the dot com boom, I hired someone onto my staff at about $10k more (annually) than current staff in similar roles were making. An HR clerk accidentally sent the offer letter to my entire staff. The fallout was that I had meaningful talks about compensation with each of my staff; made them aware that they were getting market (or better) in a rapidly changing market, and that we were keeping pace on anniversary dates. Prior to the breach, a few of my staff had been wrongly convinced that they were underpaid in their positions. The incident only strengthened the trust between us.
The Good, the Bad, and the Messenger
Your blog should allow comments, and -- short of spam, personal attacks and incivility -- shouldn't be censored. A few years ago, a former employee of my (former) org managed to register the .com extension of our domain name and put up a web site criticizing us. While the site didn't get a lot of hits, he did manage to find other departed staff with axes to grind, and his online forum was about a 50-50 mix of people trashing us and others defending. After about a month, he went in and deleted the 50% of forum messages that spoke up for our organization, leaving the now one-sided, negative conversation intact. And that was the end of his forum; nobody ever posted there again.
There were some interesting lessons here for us. He had a lot of inside knowledge that he shared, with no concern or allegiance to our policy. And he was motivated and well-resourced to use the web to attack us, But, in the end, we didn't see any negative impact on our organization. The truth was, it was easy to separate his bias from his "inside scoops", and hard to paint us in a very negative light, because the skeletons that he let out of our closet were a lot like anybody else's.
What this proves is that message delivery accounts for the messenger. Good and bad tweets and blog posts about your organization will be weighed by the position and credibility of the tweeter or blogger.
Transparency and Constituent Data Breaches
Two years ago, a number of nonprofits were faced with a difficult decision when a popular hosted eCRM service was compromised, and account information for donors was stolen by one or more hackers. Thankfully, this wasn't credit card information, but it included login details, and I'm sure that we all know people who use the same password for their online giving as they do for other web sites, such as, perhaps, their online banking. This was a serious breach, and there was a certain amount of disclosure from the nonprofits to their constituents that was mandated.
Strident voices in the community called for full disclosure, urging affected nonprofits to put a warning on the home page of their web sites. Many of the organizations settled for alerting every donor that was potentially compromised via phone and/or email, determining that their unaffected constituents might not be clear on how the breach happened or what the risks were, and would simply take the home page warning as a suggestion to not donate online.
To frame this as a black and white issue, demanding that it be treated with no discretion, is extreme. The seriousness and threat that resulted from this particular breach was not a simple thing to quantify or explain. So it boils down to a number of factors:
Scope: If all or most of your supporters are at risk, or the number at risk is in the six figure range, it's probably more responsible, in the name of protecting them, to broadcast the alert widely. If, as in the case above, those impacted are the ones donate online, then that's probably not close to the amount that would fully warrant broad disclosure, as even the strident voice pointed out.
Risk: Will your constituents understand that the notice is informational, and not an admission of guilt or irresponsibility in handling their sensitive data? Alternatively, if this becomes public knowledge, would your lack of transparency look like an admission of guilt? You should be comfortable with your decision, and able to explain it.
Consistency: Some nonprofits have more responsibility to model transparency than others. If the Sunlight Foundation was one of the organizations impacted, it's a no-brainer. Salvation Army? Transparency isn't referenced on their "Positions" page.
Courtesy: Some constituencies are more savvy about this type of thing than others. If the affected constituents have all been notified, and they represent a small portion of the donor base, it's questionable whether scaring your supporters in the name of openness is really warranted.
Since alternate exposure, in the press or community, is likely to occur, the priority is to have a consistent policy about how and when you broadcast information about security breaches. Denying that something has had happened in any public forum would be irresponsible and unethical, and most likely come right back at you. Not being able to explain why you chose not to publicize it on your website could also have damaging consequences. Erring on the side of alerting and protecting those impacted by security breaches is the better way to go, but the final choice has to weigh in all of the risks and factors.
Conclusion
All of my examples assume you're doing the right things. You have justifiable reasons for doing things that might be considered provocative. Your overall efforts are mission-focused. And the reasons for privacy regarding certain information are that it needs to be private (client medical records, for example); it supports your mission-based objectives by being private, and/or it respects the privacy of people close to the information.
No matter how well we protect our data, the walls are much thinner than they used to be. Any unfortunate tweet can "go viral". We can't put a lock on our information that will truly secure it. So it's important to manage communications with an understanding that information will be shared. Protect your overall reputation, and don't sweat the minor slips that reveal, mostly, that you're not a paragon of perfection, maybe, but a group of human beings, struggling to make a difference under the usual conditions.
I'm wrapping up the Drupal 101 series with some talk about Drupal themes, and some additional info on topics that we've already covered. The goal of these posts is to give new Drupal administrators an idea about how Drupal works, and some pointers to the key add-ons and resources in the broad Drupal ecosystem. For reference' sake, we started with an intro, moved on to Modules, and then covered navigation. So, now that we have a functional web site, what does it look like?
Getting Themes
Drupal comes with five or six themes to choose from, and, if you use them, then your site will look very, um, uninspired. This might not be a problem if your goal is not to impress your visitors, but simply provide information or functionality, but, if you're putting up a website for your organization, you want one that stands out from the crowd. So you have two choices: you can find a better, less common theme, or you can customize one of the default themes.
The first place to go is to Drupal Theme Garden. This is where many Drupal theme designers share their work. Here, you can either find a theme to use (or customize for your use), or get a good idea about the types of things you can do with your theme.
Customizing Themes
From the Administration menu, you can modify any theme's main text elements, deciding whether or not to display your site's mission or slogan, name or logo. And you can replace the default "droplet" logo with your own logo (a no-brainer!). Assuming that you've started with a theme that you really like, this might be enough. But, if you want to do more serious customizations, such as moving the logo to the center of your header or changing the site colors, you're going to need basic web 4.0 programming skills and, most likely, some level of comfort with the PHP scripting language.
Most themes consist of one or more style sheets, a number of "tpl" files with PHP/HTML code laying out various page elements, such as blocks, footers and sidebars, and one called page.tpl.php that establishes the overall page layout. The main styles are usually stored in styles.css, and you can make a lot of changes to your site's appearance here, modifying default background colors and images, placing and resizing content.
If that's not enough, most customizations can be done using Wordpress's internal macros and functions, meaning that you won't have to worry about assigning variables or what goes into the foreach loops. Wordpress has simple commands that you can insert into a page to loop through your posts and display them or list your categories in the sidebar. A nice breakdown of the Wordpress functions can be found at WpExplorer.com.
If you do modify the stylesheets and templates, make sure that you are storing your themes in sites/default folder and that you're properly backing up whenever you do an upgrade. If you modify theme files in the main themes folder, and then upgrade to, say, a Drupal security fix, your modifications will be overwritten. In general, themes remain functional from dot release to dot release (e.g., what worked for Drupal 6.1 still works in 6.9), but the Drupal maintainers often make dramatic changes in number versions, so don't assume that your theme in Drupal 6.9 will not be messed up if you upgrade to Drupal 7 (coming soon).
More Installation Options
In the first Drupal 101 post, I mentioned Fantastico, a two-click installer for Drupal available on most hosting services that use the cPanel site management interface. I subsequently ran into this useful article about Elefante and Simplescripts. These are packages that you can use to install a variety of popular open source applications, including Drupal.
In addition to application installers, there are other options for installing Drupal:
Customized Drupal installations like Open Atrium and Acquia come with more modules and functionality.
There's been some development and discussion about Installation Profiles, a Drupal add-on functionality that lets you define additional installation details, such as module defaults and inclusion of additional modules and data for distributing custom Drupal installations.
Conclusion
What I hope this Drupal 101 series has done is to offer some context and guidance for people new to Drupal who are about to give it a try, and some backing to my initial proposition that Drupal's strength is it's flexibility. Along the way, I've received tweets asking "Why Drupal?" and my answer is that Drupal isn't the only CMS out there, or necessarily the best one for your web site. There are a huge variety of commercial and open source options. In fact, my personal website runs on a combination of Frog CMS and Wordpress, because I wanted a simple tool for integrating RSS feeds, which Frog provides, and a powerful blogging platform. On the other hand, last week the White House ditched their commercial CMS for Drupal. So this series might also inspire you to look elsewhere, particularly if a more traditional, tree-structured content management interface will work better for you than Drupal's layout by association model. Whichever way you go, we suffer more from a surfeit of good options than a lack of same.
Here's the third in a series of posts on getting started with Drupal, the popular open source content management system. The short intro and discussion on modules are best read first. Today we'll look at site structure, and how menus, blocks and taxonomies can make your site navigable for your visitors.
Menus
Drupal has a simple and flexible tool for creating and managing menus. You can check/uncheck standard functions; assign them to regions (left sidebar, right sidebar, header, footer, etc.); and easily create new items.
By default, Drupal offers three menus that you can add to your site:
Navigation - The main menu is dynamic. It displays items based on the visitor's role and state of authentication. For example, an unauthenticated user might see a "Login" menu item, while an authenticated user would see "logout". An authenticated user who is also a site manager would see the Administer menu. This menu is usually placed in a sidebar, next to the main content
Primary Links - This is often the menu for the main content areas, e.g. Home, Blog, Calendar, About. Primarily links are usually placed in a site's header.
Secondary Links can be used for less popular pages, but ones that you want to have available, such as site maps, privacy notices, and contact links.
You can assign a menu item to any particular piece of content, or to a collection of items by content type. Drupal assigns numbers to individual items. The basic content type is called a node, so the default first page of a web site would be at http://your-site.org/node/1. If you create a blog, the first post would be at http://your-site.org/blog/1.
Tip: Be sure that the Path Module is enabled. Path lets you can rename items with friendlier names than, say, site/node/113.
Say you wanted blog/1 to be your front page, but you also wanted something easier to remember to appear in the address bar, you could rename it "home", so that people could browse directly to the site at http://your-site.org/home. They would see, in the center of the home page, that first blog entry. Drupal's general settings allow you to identify your home page; renaming a numeric page simply makes it friendlier for your users.
If, instead, you simply wanted the whole blog to be the home page, then you would skip the numbers, and not bother with a rename, as linking the front page to http://your-site.org/blog would accomplish that.
Drupal's real power comes in when you realize that, with the CCK module, you can make your own content types, and that can be very easy. A press release will have a similar format to a blog item (title, content). So you can create a type called press_release and link a page to it: http://your-site.org/press_release. All new press releases that you post to the site from Create Content/Press Release will appear there.
Blocks
Blocks are boxes that can be placed on one or more pages or associated with one or more content types. They usually appear in the left or right sidebars. Strategically associating blocks with particular content can be a subtler way o offer navigational aids. For example, you might want to have a block with current open positions appear on your "About" page, but not necessarily with your blog. Or you might not want the job listings to appear on pages describing your services, instead featuring a "Donate Now" box. This flexibility allows you to align content in ways that make sense for the different audiences with varying interests that your site will attract.
Taxonomies
All of the above is fine for sites without a lot of content. But, once you have a library of blog entries, press releases and documents to share, you'll want to give your visitors a way to find what they're looking for that doesn't involve inordinate amounts of scrolling. Search is a no-brainer, but even more important is to organize your content with meaningful labels. For this, use the Taxonomy module.
Taxonomies allow you to tag or classify your content using hierarchal terminology. For example, if your NPO serves the homeless, you might have papers on poverty and employment, descriptions of available shelters and programs, job opportunities, and much more. You can break this content down into meaningful categories, then assign sub-terms in each category. Once the taxonomy is in place, you can assign menu items to terms in your taxonomy, thus aggregating all of the relevant content on a single page. You can set up menu blocks for the sub-terms and assign each block to it's category page. The result is a content rich, drill down web site.
That's it for navigation. Next week, we'll talk about Themes and ways you can make your Drupal site distinctive.
Last week, I kicked off this series on setting up a basic web site with Drupal, the popular open source Content Management System. This week we're going to take a closer look at Modules, the Drupal add-ons that can extend your web site's functionality. One of the great things about Drupal is that it is a popular application with a large developer community working with and around it. So there are about a thousand modules that you can use to extend Drupal, covering everything from document management to payment processing. The good news: there's probably one that supports the functionality that you want to add to your web site. Bad news: needle in a haystack?
A potentially easier way to add extra functionality to Drupal is to download a customized version, such as CiviCRM or Open Atrium. We'll discuss those options later in the Drupal 101 series.
Core Modules
Drupal comes with a number of built-in modules that you can optionally enable. Some are obviously useful, others not so much. Here are some notes on the ones that you might not initially know that you need:
Primary content types like blog, forum and book offer different modules for user input. They can be combined, or you can pick one for a simple site. Since the differences between, say , a blog (individual journal that people can comment on) and a forum (topical posts that people can reply to) are less distinct than they are in other CMS's, you might want to pick one or two primary content types and then supplement them with more distinctive ones, such as polls or profiles.
Enabling contact allows your users to send private messages to each other on the site, as well as allowing you to set up site-wide contact forms.
OpenID allows your users more flexibility and control as to how they log into your site. I can't see a good reason not to enable this on a public site. Since more and more people have profiles on social networking sites and Google, tools like Facebook Connect or Google Friend Connect should be considered as well.
By default, Drupal asks new users for a name and email, but not much else. With the Profiles module, you can create custom fields and allow your users to share information much as they would on a social network.
Taxonomy is also recommended, and I'll talk more about that next week.
Throttle should be used on any high-traffic site to improve performance.
Use Trigger if you want to set up alerting and automation on your site.
More than some CMS's, Drupal is a content-centric system. It doesn't simply manage content, but the web interface is structured around the content it manages: content types, content metadata (taxonomies), content sources (RSS feeds). Out of the virtual box, Drupal has content types like blog entries, pages and stories. Each content type has a data entry form associated with it. So, if you create a number of stories, and you want to read them all, then you can browse to the page "story" and they'll all be listed there. CCK helps you create additional content types and use a fairly robust form-builder to customize the screens.
The Views module lets you customize the appearance and functionality of many of Drupal's standard screens, and to add your own. Unlike CCK, which is limited to the default layout of content types, Views lets you seriously customize the interface. One easy reason to install Views is in order to take advantage of the Calendar view, which gives you not only a full page, graphical calendar to add events to and display, but also sidebar calendar widgets and upcoming event lists.
Here's a tip: setting up the calendar view is reasonably tedious. The best write-up explaining it (for Drupal 6) is here: http://drupal.org/node/326061. Drupal's documentation is okay, but this is step-by-step. It does miss one step, though, which is to add the "Event Date - From date" and "Event Date - To date" to the Fields listing (with friendlier titles, like "From" and "To"). Otherwise, calendar items show on the day they were submitted instead of the day that they are occurring.
There's a good case to be made that these two modules should be folded into Drupal's base package, because, in addition to providing very powerful customization features to the core product, there are a whole slew of additional modules that require their presence. If you plan to install a number of modules and/or customize your site, these are pretty much pre-requisites, so just grab and install them.
What-You-See-Is-What-You Get, or Rich Text Format (RTE) editors transform Drupal's default data input boxes into flexible editors with Word-like toolbars. The WSYIWYG module lets you install the editor of your choice. I've done well with FCKEditor (recently rebranded CKEditor, thank you!). The WYSIWYG module lets you work with multiple RTE packages and strategically assign them to different fields and content types. Most RTE editors are very configurable, but note that, in addition to installing the modules, you need to install the editors themselves, so follow the instructions carefully.
If you're building a community site, with hopes of having lots of interactive, social features, Organic Groups gives you the flexibility to not only create all sorts of groups and affiliations on your own, but let your users create their own groups as well, much like Facebook does. For an interactive site, this is essential.
E-Commerce/Donations
Many modules are available for either integrating with Authorize.net or Paypal, or setting up your own e-commerce site. The aptly named e-Commerce module and Ubercart are among the better known and supported options.
Drupal fans: what modules do you recommend? Which do you install first? Leave your recommendations in the comments.
Next week, we'll talk about menus, blocks and taxonomies: Drupal 101: Navigation.
I've been doing a lot of work with the open source content management system Drupal lately, and thought I'd share some thoughts on how to get a new site up and running. Drupal, you might recall, got high ratings in Idealware's March '09 report comparing open source content management systems. Despite it's popularity, there are some detractors who make good points, but I find Drupal to be flexible, powerful and customizable enough to meet a lot of my web development needs.
While you can put together a very sophisticated online community and/or website with it, you can also use it for pretty simple things. For example, the nptech aggregator at nptech,info uses Drupal's excellent RSS aggregation functions extensively, and not much else. No blog, no forums. But, having installed and tried standalone RSS aggregators like Gregarius, it became clear that Drupal was just as good an aggregator and, if desired, much, much more. Similarly, when co-workers were looking for a site to share documents with optional commenting (to replace an FTP repository), Drupal was a good choice to support a simple task without locking out growth possibilities.
Installation
Installing Drupal can be a three click process or a unix command line nightmare, depending on your circumstances. These days, there are simple options. If you are using a web host, check to see if your site management console is the popular CPanel, and, if so, if it includes the Fantastico utility. Fantastico offers automated installs for many popular open source CMSes, blogs and utilities.
Absent Fantastico, your host might have something similar, or you can download the Drupal source and follow the instructions. Required skills include the ability to modify text files, change file and folder permissions, and create a MySQL database. At a minimum, FTP access to your server, or a good, web-based file manager, will be required.
If you're installing on your own server, things to be aware of are that you'll need to have PHP, MySQL and a decent web server, such as Apache installed (these are generally installed by default on Linux, but not on Windows). If you use Linux, consumer-focused Linux variants like Ubuntu and Fedora will have current versions of these applications, properly configured. More robust Linux distributions, like Redhat Enterprise, sometimes suffer from their cautious approach by including software versions that are obsolete. I'm a big fan of Centos, the free version of Red Hat Enterprise, but I'm frustrated that it comes with an older, insecure version of PHP and only very annoying ways to remedy that.
Up and Running
Once installed, Drupal advises you to configure and customize your web site. There are some key decisions to be made, and the success of the configuration process will be better assured if you have a solid idea as to what your web site is going to be used for. With that clearly defined, you can configure the functionality, metadata, site structure, and look and feel of your web site.
Install and enable Modules. Which of the core modules (the ones included in the Drupal pacckage) need to be enabled, and what additional modules are required in order to build your site? This is the first place I go.
Define the site Taxonomy. While you can build a site without a taxonomy, you should only do so for a simple site. A well structured taxonomy helps you make your site navigable; enhances searching; and provides a great tool for pyramid-style content management, with broad topics on one level and the ability to refine and dig deeper intuitively built into the site.
Structure your site with Blocks. You can define blocks, assign them to regions on a page (such as the sidebars or header) and restrict them to certain pages. On the theory that a good web site navigates the user through the site intelligently, based on what they click, the ability to dynamically highlight different content on different pages is one of Drupal's real strengths.
Theme your web site. Don't settle for the default themes -- there are hundreds (or thousands) to choose from. Go to Drupal Theme Garden and find one that meets your needs, then tweak it. You can do a lot with a good theme and the built in thee design tools, or, if you're a web developer, you can modify your themes PHP and CSS to create something completely unique. Just be sure that you followed the installation suggestions as to where to store themes and modules so that they won't get overwritten by an upgrade.
This just brushes the surface, so I'll do some deeper dives into Drupal configuration over the next few weeks.
The popular theory is that, with social networks like Twitter and Facebook serving as link referral tools, there's no need to setup and look at feeds in a reader anymore. And I agree that many people will forgo RSS in favor of the links that their friends and mentors tweet and share. But this is kind of like saying that, if more people shop at farmer's markets than supermarkets, we will no longer need trucks. Dave Winer, quite arguably the founder of RSS, and our friends at ReadWriteWeb have leapt to RSS's defense with similar points - Winer puts it best, saying:
"These protocols...are so deeply ingrained in the infrastructure they become part of the fabric of the Internet. They don't die, they don't rest in piece."
My arguments for the defense:
1. RSS is, and always has been about, taking control of the information you peruse. Instead of searching, browsing, and otherwise separating a little wheat from a load of chaff, you use RSS to subscribe to the content that you have vetted as pertinent to your interests and needs. While that might cross-over a bit with what your friends want to share on Facebook, it's you determining the importance, not your friends. For a number of us, who use the internet for research; brand monitoring; or other explicit purposes, a good RSS Reader will still offer the best productivity boost out there.
2. Where do you think your friends get those links? It's highly likely that most of them -- before the retweets and the sharing -- grabbed them from an RSS feed. I post links on Twitter and Facebook, and I get most of them from my Google Reader flow.
3. It's not the water, it's the pipe. The majority of those links referred by Twitter are fed into Twitter via RSS. Twitterfeed, the most popular tool for feeding RSS data to Twitter, boasts about half a million feeds. Facebook, Friendfeed and their ilk all allow importing from RSS sources to profiles.
So, here are some of the ways I use RSS every day:
Basic Aggregation with Drupal
My first big RSS experiment built on the nptech tagging phenomenon. Some background: About five years ago, with the advent of RSS-enabled websites that allowed for storing and tagging information (such as Delicious, Flickr and most blogging platforms), Techsoup CEO Marnie Webb had a bright idea. She started tagging articles, blog posts, and other content pertinent to those working in or with nonprofits and technology with the tag "nptech". She invited her friends to do the same. And she shared with everyone her tips for setting up an RSS newsreader and subscribing to things marked with our tag. Marnie and I had lunch in late 2005 and agreed that the next step was to set up a web site that aggregated all of this information. So I put up the nptech.info site, which continues to pull nptech-tagged blog entries from around the web.
Other Tricks
Recently, I used Twitterfeed to push the nptech aggregated information to the nptechinfo Twitter account. So, if you don't like RSS, you can still get the links via Twitter. But stay aware that they get there via RSS!
But I'm pretty dull -- what's more exciting is the way that Google Reader let me create a "bundle" of all of the nptech blogs that I follow. You can sample a bunch of great Idealware-sympatico bloggers just by adding it to your reader.
Last week, I shared my impressions of Google Wave, which takes current web 2.0/Internet staple technologies like email, messaging, document collaboration, widgets/gadgets and extranets and mashes them up into an open communications standard that, if it lives up to Google's aspirations, will supersede email. There is little doubt in my mind that this is how the web will evolve. We've gone from:
The Yahoo! Directory model - a bunch of static web sites that can be catalogued and explored like chapters in a book, to
The Google needle/haystack approach - the web as a repository of data that can be mined with a proper query, to
Web 2.0, a referral-based model that mixes human opinion and interaction into the navigation system.
For many of us, we no longer browse, and we search less than we used to, because the data that we're looking for is either coming to us through readers and portals where we subscribe to it, or it's being referred to us by our friends and co-workers on social networks. Much of what we refer to eachother is content that we have created. The web is as much an application as it is a library now.
Google Wave might well be "Web 3.0", the step that breaks down the location-based structure of web data and replaces it completely with a social structure. Data isn't stored as much as it is shared. You don't browse to sites; you share, enhance, append, create and communicate about web content in individual waves. Servers are sources, not destinations in the new paradigm.
Looking at Wave in light of Google's mission and strategy supports this idea. Google wants to catalog, and make accessible, all of the world's information. Wave has a data mining and reporting feature called "robots". Robots are database agents that lurk in a wave, monitoring all activity, and then pop in as warranted when certain terms or actions trigger their response. The example I saw was of a nurse reporting in the wave that they're going to give patient "John Doe" a peanut butter sandwich. The robot has access to Doe's medical record, is aware of a peanut allergy, and pops in with a warning. Powerful stuff! But the underlying data source for Joe's medical record was Google Health. For many, health information is too valuable and easily abused to be trusted to Google, Yahoo!, or any online provider. The Wave security module that I saw hid some data from Wave participants, but was based upon the time that the person joined the Wave, not ongoing record level permissions.
This doesn't invalidate the use of Wave, by any means -- a wave that is housed on the Doctor's office server, and restricted to Doctor, Nurse and patient could enable those benefits securely. But as the easily recognizable lines between cloud computing and private applications; email and online community; shared documents and public records continue to blur, we need to be careful, and make sure that the learning curve that accompanies these web evolutions is tended to. After all, the worst public/private mistakes on the internet have generally involved someone "replying to all" when they didn't mean to. If it's that easy to forget who you're talking to in an email, how are we going to consciously track what we're revealing to whom in a wave, particularly when that wave has automatons popping data into the conversation as well?
The Wave as internet evolution idea supports a favored notion: data wants to be free. Open data advocates (like myself) are looking for interfaces that enable that access, and Wave's combination of creation and communication, facilitated by simple, but powerful data mining agents, is a powerful frontend. If it truly winds up as easy as email, which is, after all, the application that enticed our grandparents to use the net, then it has culture-changing potential. It will need to bring the users along for that ride, though, and it will be interesting to see how that goes.
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A few more interesting Google Wave stories popped up while I was drafting this one. Mashable's Google Wave: 5 Ways It Could Change the Web gives some concrete examples to some of the ideas I floated last week; and, for those of you lucky enough to have access to Wave, here's a tutorial on how to build a robot.
Google is on a fishing expedition to see if we're willing to take web-surfing to a whole new level. My colleague Steve Backman introduced us to Google Wave a few months ago. I attended a developer's preview at Techsoup Headquarters last week, and I have some additional thoughts to share.
Google's introduction of Wave is nothing if not ambitious. As opposed to saying "We have a new web mashup tool" or "We've taken multimedia email to a new level", they're pitching Wave as nothing less than the successor to email. My question, after seeing the demo, is "Is that an outrageous claim, or a way too modest one?".
The early version of Google Wave I saw looked a lot like Gmail, with a folder list on the left and "wave" list next to it. Unlike Gmail, a third pane to the right included an area where you can compose waves, so Wave is three-columner to Gmail's two.
A wave is a collaborative document that can be updated by numerous people in real-time. This means that, if we're both working in the same wave, you can see what I'm typing, letter by letter, as I can see what you add. This makes Twitter seem like the new snail mail. It's a pretty powerful step for collaborative technology. But it's also quite a cultural change for those of us who appreciate computer-based communications for the incorporated spell-check and the ability to edit and finalize drafted messages before we send them.
Waves can include text, photos, film clips, forms, and any active content that could go into a Google Gadget. If you check out iGoogle, Google's personal portal page, you can see the wide assortment of gadgets that are available and imagine how you would use them -- or things like them -- in a collaborative document. News feeds, polls, games, utilities, and the list goes on.
You share waves with any other wave users that you choose to share with. User-level security is being written into the platform, so that you can share waves as read-only or only share certain content in waves with particular people.
Given these two tidbits, it occurred to me that each wave was far more like a little Extranet than an email message. This is why I think Google's being kind of coy when they call it an email killer - it's a Sharepoint killer. It's possibly a Drupal (or fill in your favorite CMS here) killer. It's certainly an evolution of Google Apps, with pretty much all of that functionality rolled into a model that, instead of saying "I have a document, spreadsheet or website to share" says "I want to share, and, once we're sharing, we can share websites, spreadsheets, documents and whatever". Put another way, Google Apps is an information management tool with some collaborative and communication features. Google Wave is a communications platform with a rich set of information management tools. It's Google Docs inverted.
So, Google Wave has the potential to be very disruptive technology, as long as people:
Adopt it;
Feel comfortable with it; and
Trust Google.
Next week, I'll spend a little time on the gotcha's - please add your thoughts and concerns in the comments.
Internet culture addicts like me have taken gleeful note of Mashable's campaign to rid the world of Microsoft's Internet Explorer version 6. Anyone who develops public web pages (and cares if they are compatible with other and/or modern browsers) is sympathetic to this cause. The hoops that we have to jump through to make our pages look acceptable in IE6 while taking advantage of the nearly decade old CSS positioning commands are ridiculous. When I was doing web consulting a few years back, IE6 compatibility coding generally took up about 20% of the total project time.
Microsoft's response to the Mashable campaign was to defend the brontosaurus-like pace of corporate IT Departments in performing application updates. Here's the pertinent MS Spokesperson quote:
“[Corporate IT departments] balance their personal enthusiasm for upgrading PCs with their accountability to many other priorities their organizations have. As much as they (or site developers, or Microsoft or anyone else) want them to move to IE8 now, they see the PC software image as one part of a larger IT picture with its own cadence.”
Huh! This from the company that kept threatening to drop Windows XP support in order to force us to Vista.
But, sarcasm aside, this is a flawed argument. The "cadence" in which an IT Department upgrades software should be influenced by changes in the general technology landscape. Business (and nonprofit!) networks use the Internet. Those networks are already integrated with the world at large. Since the web browser is one of the primary interfaces to external data, it's easy to make the case that it needs to be upgraded more often than word processors and spreadsheets.
Many major webs sites are designed with CSS 3.0 formatting. IE6 doesn't fully support the 11 year old CSS 2.0 specification. IT departments that aren't prioritizing this upgrade are providing poor support for users who need such websites. They're also creating more work for themselves supporting the workarounds. Large companies might have far more computers to upgrade, but they also have software that automates that process. The key issue is training. Microsoft dramatically changed the user interface of Internet Explorer with version 7, but there are options to default back to the IE6 layout. The hassle of learning the new interface is certainly not as bad as not being able to properly use websites that are designed for more modern browsers.
What really irks me is the way that Microsoft has described the "IE6 must die" campaign' as being intended to appease "technology enthusiasts". The push to move users to modern browsers is not about my desire to use non-business applications like Facebook, Digg and YouTube (and classifying these web sites as "non-business"is a pretty debatable point as well). It's about my desire to benefit from advancements in web technology, and provide my staff with new tools that promote their mission-focused work.
With the HTML 5 specifications about to become the new standard, IE6 is obsolete. The types of things that IE6 doesn't support are the things that are making web-based applications viable, affordable alternatives to traditional software. Microsoft has been in the driver's seat of the companies that set the pace of technology advancement. They should be consistent in supporting the migration and adoption to those new standards, given a reasonable amount of time. Eight years is reasonable. IE6 must die, and Microsoft should join the chorus.
As the internet has progressed from a shared source of information to a primary communications tool, a natural offshoot of the migration has been where the two things meet: people referring internet information. If you're active at all on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Friendfeed, or any of the numerous online communities, big or small, then you are regularly seeing links to useful articles and blog posts; cute YouTube videos, and entertaining photos. Much of this information is passed along from online friend to online friend, but where does the first referral originate from? Usually, it's somebody's RSS reader.
The main reason that I'm such an RSS advocate is that I believe that it's the tool that lets me find the strategic and useful needles lost in the haystack of celebrity gossip, prurient content, and corporate promotional materials that they're buried under. But it isn't "RSS", per se, that does the filtering -- it's other people, whom I call "information agents", who do the sifting. If I want to keep up with fundraising trends, a topic that interests me, but, as an IT Director, isn't my primary area of expertise, I'm not going to spend thirty minutes a day doing research. I subscribe to some very pertinentblogs, and I follow a few people on Twitter and in Reader who find the important and insightful articles and share them with me.
Now it appears that Google wants to cut out the social media middlepeople. As I alluded to in my article on RSS, and fleshed out in this post about sharing with reader, the ability to refer information that you find in Reader is one of the things that makes it so powerful. Last week, Google seriously upped the ante by adding Twitter/Facebook/Delicious-like following, "liking" and sharing to the mix.
Here's what the new features do:
Sharing now lets you share with the world, or just those members of the world that you want to share with. Google has always allowed you to share items, but connecting to other people was a bit arcane and limited, as, by default, Google only allowed you to connect to those that you chat with in GMail. If you read up on it, you learned that you could change that to any defined group of associates in your Google Contacts (all of this assuming that you use Google Contacts - many Google Reader users don't). As someone who does use all of the Google stuff, I still found that opening this up to 80 or so people in my contacts didn't make it clear to many of them as to how they could connect with me.
The new Following feature lets you follow anyone who is willing to share, not just people that you personally communicate with. Now my shared items are marked as public, so anyone can follow my shared items feed by clicking on "Sharing Settings" (in the "People You Follow" section) and searching for me by name or email address. Once you locate me (or someone else), you can (and should) browse through their items to make sure that they share things that you'll find useful. For example, I share a lot of things that are on the topics that I blog about here. But I also share items related to civil rights issues and the occasional link that I find funny. Since humor and politics are very subjective topics, you might want to be sure that you're not going to be annoyed or offended you before you subscribe to a feed.
But the internet is not just about who you know. The Like feature allows you to find new people to follow based on common interests. You'll note that certain articles have a new note at the top saying "XX people liked this", where "XX" is the number of people who have indicated that they like the article by checking the option at the bottom of the post. This message is a link, and clicking it expands it into links to each of the people who "liked" it, allowing you to browse their shared items and optionally follow them. This, to me, enables the real power of the social web -- finding people who share your interests, but have better sources. It's what initially was so exciting about social bookmarking service Delicious, and it's about time that Google Reader enabled it.
I'm hoping the Google's next round of Reader updates will improve our ability to not just tag and classify the information that we find, but also share based on those classifications. That will enable me to selectively publish items that I think are of interest to others, perhaps sending nptech links to Friendfeed and the humorous stuff to Facebook. But I welcome these improvements, and I appreciate the way that reader becomes more and more of a single stop for information discovery and distribution. The Internet would be a messier place without it.
Even if you will never tweet, it's obvious that Twitter is a source of useful information, and, in some cases, a more timely source than traditional search engines and media. If you use Firefox as your main web browser, and have the popular Greasemonkey add-on installed, which serves as a kind of macro language for the web, then the Twitter Google Results script adds some real power. Any Google search you perform will also search Twitter, posting the top five relevant results. Why is this useful? Well, when we heard rumors that a bomb had gone off somewhere near our Bozeman, Montana office, the Twitter results had current info and links that weren't indexed by Google yet
Namechk checks for your preferred username on a slew of Web 2.0 sites, from Bebo to Youtube. I found this useful to reserve peterscampbell at a few sites that I want to use but hadn't signed up for, and to learn that some other guy named peterscampbell had already grabbed it at Youtube, where I had used a different loginname... snap!
This is a tip, not a tool - if you've been stymied by Facebook's recent changes to how it handles updates, you can make a lot more sense of it by making lists of related friends, and then filtering the updates by group. Click on Friends and the "Create New List" button is at the top of the screen. I have lists for family, nptech, Boston friends, SF Friends, and a special one called "no tweets", which filters out everyone who cross-posts all of their Twitter updates to Facebook (my default view). Keeping up with all of this info is always a challenge, so the ability to filter out the echoes is a must.
Exhibit is a web site that lets you upload spreadsheets, maps and other data to an information rich, filterable, active web page that can then be shared. If your org works with a particular environmental cause, seeks a cure for a disease, or supports a particular community, you can share data about your cause dynamically and expressively with this amazing site.
Google revolutionized email with GMail, the first email platform in decades to question the basic assumptions about how email should work (by filing important email into folders). They're about to do the same thing with Voicemail. A year or two ago, they purchased Grandcentral, a service that allowed you to route multiple phone numbers to one shared voicemail box. A few months ago, they opened the revamped Google Voice to existing Grandcentral customers, and, surprise, it looks a bit like GMail.
When I look at GMail, Google Voice, and the recently announced Google Wave, a real-time communication and collaboration platform, and then picture these all integrated into a Google Apps account, it becomes clear that our phone systems are moving into the cloud as fast as our servers are, and, while it is always that controversial proposition of Google giving you stuff in return for the right to market to you based on all of your data, it still looks like they are poised to offer one of the most powerful, integrated communication platforms that the world has ever seen.
Have you run into any awesome things lately worth sharing? Leave a comment!
I'm continuing with follow-up topics from my RSS article, Using RSS Tools to Feed your Information Needs. Last week, I discussed integrating content with websites, and this week I'm going to dive into one of the more advanced ways to work with RSS content. This gets a little geeky, but it really shows off some of the sophistication of this technology.
The article provides numerous examples of RSS sources, but all in the form of web sites, blogs and web services that offer you one or more streams of information. If you want to narrow your view beyond the feeds available on a site, say, because you are only interested in Idealware posts about CRM tools or the ones written by Steve Backman, then you need a tool that will refine your search. Alternatively, you might want to put a section containing news stories relevant to a particular issue on your site, but want some control over the sources, as well as the subject matter. For this amount of control over the content you retrieve, you want to use something like Yahoo! Pipes.
Pipes is an RSS mashup editor. It's a tool that looks a bit like Microsoft's Visio, where you drag boxes onto a grid and draw relationships between them. But it's not a layout or flowcharting tool; instead, it's a visual mapping and filtering tool that lets you identify sources and then apply rules to those sources before merging them into an aggregated feed. To break that down, let's say that your goal is to either monitor talk about a bill, or, maybe, to publish a section on your web site titled "What they're saying about bill 221b" (I made that bill up). You have identified eight blogs that have good posts on the subject, and these are blogs that you trust to properly represent the issues and not, in any way, malign or confuse your efforts.
In Pipes, you can select all eight as sources, and then set up a filter to block any posts that don't reference "221b". The resulting RSS feed -- which you can then subscribe to our republish -- will isolate the posts that are relevant to the bill from your selected sources.
For example, here's that pipe that will allow you to skip Michelle, Heather, Paul, Laura, Eric and my posts and just see Steve's:
Another, more advanced example: You have an organizational Twitter feed that you want to republish to your site But you only want to publish your posts, not your individual replies. In Twitter, a reply is always identifiable by the very first character, which will be an "@" sign. Twitter RSS items arrive in the format "yourtwitterid: tweet", so any reply will start with "yourtwitterid: @". Setting up a Yahoo Pipe filter to block any result with ": @" in the text will isolate your posts from the replies. You can add a "Regex" (e.g. Search/Replace) command to replace "yourtwittername:" with nothing in order to publish just the tweet. The pipe will look like this:
If you play with Pipes (Yahoo! ID required, otherwise free), I highly recommend starting with an example like mine or this one by Gina Trapani to get the feel of it. Save your pipe, and you can subscribe to it -- it updates automatically, and you don't have to make it public for it to work.
Google has it's competing Google Mashups tool in private beta, and similar tools are popping up all over the web. I talk a lot about how RSS is the technology that allows us to manage the information on the web. Pipes let us refine it. It's great stuff.
Look for more RSS talk on OPML files and Google Reader in my upcoming posts.
"Show Options" link on your results page? Do a search for whatever interests you and try it (it's located right under the Google logo). This will add a left navigation bar with some very useful filtering options. Of note, you can narrow to a trendy real-time search buy clicking on "Latest" under "Any Time"; choose a date range,filter out the pages that you've seen, or haven't seen yet - how useful is that for finding that page that you googled last week but didn't save? The funny thing is that Google has an "Advanced Search" screen, which, of course, can do many things that this bar can't (such as searching for public domain media).
But if you're the slightest bit of a power user, or you work in an environment where users share mailbox folders or use Exchange's Public Folders, than keeping track of all of those folders can get a bit tedious. 
That's what the Shortcut view is for. Buried below the Mail, Calendar and Task buttons, you can move it up to the visible button list by right-clicking on the bar area (in the lower-left hand corner of Outlook 2003 or 2007's screen) and choosing "Navigation Pane Options". Highlight "Shortcuts" and then click "Move up" enough times to get it in one of the first four positions. Click OK, then click on the "Shortcuts" bar. From here, you can add new shortcuts and, optionally, arrange them in shortcut groups. You can rename the shortcuts with more meaningful titles, so that, if, say, you're monitoring a norther user's inbox, you can give it their name instead of having two folders named "Inbox". One tip: to add shortcuts to a group, right-click on the group title and add from there. 
I'm wrapping up the Drupal 101 series with some talk about Drupal themes, and some additional info on topics that we've already covered. The goal of these posts is to give new Drupal administrators an idea about how Drupal works, and some pointers to the key add-ons and resources in the broad Drupal ecosystem. For reference' sake, we started with 
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