I’ve been reading Sonny Cloward’s Vermont Nonprofit CommunIT blog lately. Lots of good stuff on IT for NPOs, including several pieces on low/no direct cost CRM applications for the non profit sector. He wrote his own review of Salesforce.com and more recently provided a link to another: At Play in the Fields of…Salesforce? Check it out.
Spotted via Joe Gregorio:
Dave Child does cheat sheets. He does them very well. So far he has ones for PHP, CSS and mod_rewrite. Warm up the laminator, baby.
Very nice!
Ben Martin has taken the initiative to organize an association blogger meeting at ASAE’s Annual Meeting in Nashville this August: Y’all meet me in Nashville
This is an all-call to association bloggers attending the ASAE Annual Meeting in Nashville. You’re invited to a meet-up of association bloggers. Time, date and exact location are to be determined. Leave a comment or email me to begin the discussion about when, where and what to discuss when we meet.
Be sure to post a comment to Ben’s blog if you want to attend. I’m looking forward to it!
World Changing is a fantastic blog about how our world is, uh, changing. 🙂 They are forming an NPO organization with which to manage and grow their operations. And they are staffing up! Check out the job announcement if the following applies to you:
If herding a growing gang of super-smart, passionate, global cats into a finely-tuned anarchist marching band sounds like fun to you, boy do we have your dream job.
I am familiar with a couple of the folks who write for World Changing via The Well. Should be a fascinating and demanding job.
Nic Wolff has posted a really cool tool: Password generator
So, this is a little Javascript program that will concatenate two fields and MD5 them. The idea is that you choose one master password to secure all your others, and then generate passwords for each site, server, router, &c. by putting a completely obvious name for that resource in the “Site name” field.
Half the web seems to be linking to this but I thought I would get in on it too. Looks like a great way for simplifying your personal logins while still being very secure.
Nancy White posted on her blog about Target adding blogging skills to the job requirements for a media relations position: Full Circle Online Interaction Blog: Target requires blogging skills for media relations people
Not only are blogging skills going to be prerequisites, but more generally good online communications skills. Last week I got the chance to have a conversation with David Millen from IBM. I was blathering that I thought everyone will need online facilitation skills and he gently and accurately got me to sharpen my message. Not everyone has a job that requires negotiating meaning and roles in groups. 😉 Not everyone is going to need to be an online facilitator and those specific skills, just like the skills of a great blogger, my be more sharply defined in some roles more than others. But I’d venture a guess that many working in business will need to be skillful online communicators at some base level.
Nancy makes a really good point about the general need for online communication skills across the company. With more and more interaction being computer mediated, organizations that are generally savvy about online communication (oncomm?) will have a great advantage over those that don’t.
For example, when PR people do blogs without authentic online communication skills and experience you end up with stuff like fake blogs.
Great post by Nancy. Read the whole thing.
You’re It! is a new blog on tagging (aka folksonomy) written by Jon Lebkowski, David Weinberger, Christian Crumlish, among others. Looks like this one should be worth adding to your aggregator of choice.
I gave a demo of our intranet yesterday. I had a few slides of background material I wanted to cover first and then jump into the site for the rest of the presentation. So, I grabbed the S5 presentation template and created an HTML-based slideshow and linked to the intranet on the last slide. The beauty of this is that I didn’t have to do any awkward application switching between powerpoint and the browser. It really made the presentation much smoother by running the whole thing through the browser.
CMS Watch posted a nice screencast a while back that demonstrates how some CMS packages are currently using AJAX techniques to enhance their user interfaces. Definitely worth checking out. I especially like the autocomplete feature for users tagging content with keywords from a controlled vocabulary. (Thanks to Mark T for posting about this and bringing it back to my attention.)
I have a bad habit of stashing links to stuff I want to blog here and there (well, mostly here) and then never getting around to posting about them. In an effort to circumvent my usual behavior, here are a few slightly dusty links.
Extreme Usability
Great post about the benefits of pairing a usability/interface person with an engineer to rapidly iterate improvements in design. I’ve had the same experience when working side-by-side with our web admin.
Password Design Pattern
Good tips on designing password protection systems. Directly related to my earlier post today.
IBM Gets Folksy
Post about how IBM plans to implement folksonomy tagging to its massive intranet operation.
C. David Gammel, CAE 