Google Supporting Non-Profits & Taking Environmental Initiatives

I've modified this article as Google has removed a few of it's pages and so I've pointed the links to the Way Back Machine. Not sure where Google's Climate Change, Public Health and Economic Development programs are now. Hopefully Google is trying to be good rather than just trying to get good press, however there are some interesting initiatives that Google is starting to take. They have fairly recently: Google Grants - Free advertising for charitable organizations in several countries including Canada Google Earth Outreach - Put your organizations efforts on Google Earth Hosting events with non-profit hubs like the...

Open Source Security Fears

NOTE: There is a new effort to do this in Ottawa with Tech4good . Earlier this week I went out to Green Drinks Ottawa and had a really good conversation with a table of committed and very experienced environmentalists. Open source came up in conversation, and one of the people brought up security concerns as the main reason that their organization had decision not to use open source software, but rather to develop custom applications. I brought up a couple examples of how pretty much every big corporation is using open source software these days and are investing in its...

Measuring Google Trends Across Canada

Decided to check out a few of Google's new mapping plugins and did a quick test of Geotrends. Must say that it is a neat twist to find where people are searching for search terms. This builds on Google's Trends , which is pretty useful, but isn't really geared to searching your geography. I did a search based on some CMS's that we will be testing for internationalization, basic usability & customization to see which of these terms Drupal, Joomla, Plone, Typo3, Wordpress people are searching for. However when looking for what's hot in eastern Canada this Google Maps plugin...

Want to Upgrade to a New CMS?

There are a lot of issues to consider when upgrading your website. Most often it seems the organization looking for the change focuses mostly on the new design of the site. Design is just one element and it usually isn't the most critical one to your new site's success. It makes sense that when people want to launch a new site that they will also launch a new design. This is generally a good idea as often converting a design to a new content management system will be nearly as difficult as creating a new design in the first place...

Jumping to Drupal Will Help Your Search Engine Results

I was contacted by a company earlier this week that wanted to enhance their search engine results and wanted to incorporate some dynamic aspects to their website to help them do this. After looking at their site and thinking about our experience with SEO I thought that there would be some huge advantages to migrating their site over to this Content Management System.In this blog post I want to highlight some of the steps that I proposed to make the shift from a static HTML site to an optimized Drupal site. There are a number of details of exactly how...

Strategic Use of Flickr by Non-Profits

In the last month I've noticed a number of NGO/NPO's have started to use one of the early Web 2.0 poster children Flickr . Unlike many of the other social networking sites out there, Flickr's all about the photos. You can't upload movies, write notes, or stick something on someone's wall like you can in newer tools like Facebook . However, if what you want is an interface for propagating images, Flickr is still one of the nicer ones. I started using Flickr in 2005 largely as a means of keeping track of people who I had met at the...

Import HTML Module

The Import HTML module is a Drupal module that facilitates migrating from your existing site to a Drupal content management system. This module has the potential to save a lot of time and energy when importing an existing site. In many cases, migrating to a new website can mean copying and pasting large amounts of content, even though the pages are all formatted in a similar fashion. The import_html module can help automate much of this tedious work. Testing of Two Websites At OpenConcept, we focused on testing the Import HTML module on two main websites. The first website was...

What Action You Need to Take When a Techie Leaves

The following list is good practice regardless of the conditions of the tech's departure. In the case of a firing, these are all the more important, and will require more planning. Basic Authorization change basic usernames & passwords for all services above. ensure that the emails for all services above are valid and pointing to your new techie or a generic tech account. contact service providers and ensure that they all have the new contact name, phone number and email. tell your clients that the departing techie is no longer working there. Company Resources back up and then delete the...

What You Need to Know Before a Techie Leaves

Steve & I have prepared a short list of things to help prepare your organization when you loose your techie. Many organizations rely heavily on their techies, but don't have a plan in place to replace them when they leave. The following is a list of things that may help ensure that there is as little disruption as possible when a key technical staff person leaves. Basic server/network access (for local machines, but also also dedicated or virtual servers) how is user authentication managed? what are the root and other administrator usernames / passwords. are there routers, firewalls, or other...

Building a Conference Registration Site

Worth noting that there is now an interesting install profile for conferences available for Drupal. I started writing this post shortly after DrupalCamp Toronto, but didn't have a good time to finish it off. James Walker provided a good example of how to reproduce a conference registration site in his workshop "Building an event site in an hour". This functionality is useful for all sorts of organizations including the Drupal community, this recipe has been used for the Open Source CMS Summit at the Yahoo Campus and also at Toronto's Drupal Camp and will be rolled up to be used...