island94.org

Myself and the Nonprofit Millennial Blogger Alliance are proud to announce the launch of a new website: NonprofitMillennials.org: “We blog about the millennial generation and nonprofits!”

The Nonprofit Millennial Blogger Alliance is made up of young writers collectively bringing important issues about the nonprofit sector to the forefront. While each of us looks at the sector from a different perspective we share the view that millennials offer something valuable to nonprofits.

By sharing our knowledge and experiences from within Generation Y we can help prepare the next generation—and engage current generations—in addressing the pressing issues that continue to shape the nonprofit sector and the world

The website aggregates posts from all members of the alliance in one place, making it easy to find a fresh article, subscribe to everyone’s RSS feed all in one place, or easily find us on Twitter (@npmillennials) where new articles are posted too.

I led the technical development and design on the website and am very proud of the outcome. The concept for a central aggregating website had been batted around for several months and I was able to take the lead as closer. We wanted a straightforward website that would highlight but not overshadow the writings of individual bloggers. It’s built on WordPress, and posts are aggregated via the FeedWordPress plugin (which does an awesome job linking all posts back to their original author’s website, not ours!). Because the main focus is on our authors, not their content, there is a little secret sauce holding it all together.

So if you’re a millennial blogger writing about social change or the nonprofit sector, please consider joining us. And don’t forget that “millennial” has 2 N’s (I do, all the time).

Tomorrow is launch day for a blog aggregator website I worked on, but because I can’t write about that just yet I thought I’d write about a website whose development has influenced a lot of my approach to minimal webdesign: Pantextual.com

(Few things ever die on the Internet, but Pantextual is definitely past its prime and has aged poorly as functions have been disabled to thwart spammers. Be that may…)

Pantextual was a micro-blogging experiment developed by Rebecca White and me in 2006; before we were completely sure we wanted to blog via text message. As an experiment, our intent was more of exploration than refinement—and refining with Drupal 5RC would have taken all the fun out of it. Our about page read:

Sometimes even a little bit is too much.
But what if it was really beautiful, interesting and fun?
Then you might not notice all the other irritations of life so much.
Perhaps you might enjoy it.

Our goal was to fit as much content into a square box as possible and yet still make it a pleasure to read and an invitation to explore.

There was the obvious: nice typography (and Rebecca is to thank for the lovely ligature in the logo); gracefully overflowing if the content wouldn’t fit (you never know); not overwhelming the reader with content, even if it’s brief; and being playful: short content tends to be pithy content and we wanted a functional design to match.

The biggest problem by far was metadata. We wanted to stick with the standard conventions: date, author, categories, comments; we needed to find a place to put them and where we put them would determine if they were meaningful. Categories were the most fun to explore.

On Pantexual, we put categories inline, creating a custom syntax for tagging words as categories within the content itself. We also only displayed those words as categories if there was more than 1 post with that category. As the website filled in, we would place other content related through the categories next to the post itself, inviting exploration.

All in all, we did pretty good with a 400 pixel square box… maybe we should resuscitate it.

I really like using the Drupal CAPTCHA system with ReCAPTCHA (the one that helps scan in books). Both of them suck in the standard “Drupal makes everything ugly and hard to use by default, but it’s still easier than building something from scratch”.

One of ReCaptcha’s problems is that the words are sometimes hard to read. To deal with that, I used this tip from a Stumbleupon developer in the comments of this post entitled ReCAPTCHA’s quality is going down? : putting a link to reload—Recaptcha.reload()—the CAPTCHA in the explanation. To do that, I pasted this into the Challenge Description setting on the CAPTCHA admin page:

<br />
To prevent spam, please type the two words you see below separated by a space. &lt;a href=&quot;javascript:Recaptcha.reload();&quot; title=&quot;Get a new set of words&quot;&gt;Can't read the words?&lt;/a&gt;<br />

I also used CSS to hide the fieldset border box and title from the comments to cut down on the cruft too.

I’m always curious to see what people spec out for consulting (since I have my own template as well). Found this great listing (pasted below) from SitePoint

via one of our VISTAs’s personal website UI and Me.

End of Days buy


Background

    * Goals. What are your specific goals? Consider:
          o company/brand awareness,
          o product/services awareness,
          o product/services sales,
          o community building,
          o entertainment,
          o knowledge sharing, and
          o internal communications. 

    * Promotional Fit. How should your Website fit with current promotional and marketing strategies and materials?

    * Deadlines. What are the schedule or deadline requirements?

    * Funding. What are the budgetary constraints?

    * Measurement. How will you measure the success of the site? 

Next Steps:

   1. Develop a ranked (from most- to least-important) Goals Master List.
   2. Create a mission statement for the site.
   3. Identify how the mission and goals of the site might change from short-term to long-term, given the direction of your organization and industry. 

Audience

    * External. Who is your EXTERNAL audience? Consider:
          o current customers,
          o potential customers,
          o suppliers,
          o professional/trade organizations,
          o investors,
          o competitors,
          o children,
          o schools/educators, and
          o the sight-impaired. 

    * Internal. Who is your INTERNAL audience? Consider:
          o all employees,
          o management,
          o marketing/sales,
          o operations, and
          o IT. 

    * Sub-groups. Determine all subgroups within the audiences identified above.

    * Define. Identify the interests, technical skills and special issues for each audience group and subgroup. 

Next Steps:

   1. Create a ranked Audience Master List.
   2. Develop an Aligned Master List by matching the Audience Master List to the Goals Master List.
   3. Create usage scenarios based on Aligned Master List. 

Resources

    * Project Roles. Who are the resources that will be responsible for content management and technical support (include their names, titles, roles, and contact info)?
    * Team Skills. What are the technical and content management skills of each resource? 

Next Steps:
For each resource, identify any training, software, hardware, scheduling and budgetary issues.

Competition

    * Identify Competitors. Identify the sites of competitors and others that may provide direction for your site.
    * Important Elements. Identify the important elements of each competitor site:
          o functional features,
          o technologies used,
          o breadth of content and
          o look-and-feel.

Content

    * Functionality. Which functional features should your site offer? Consider:
          o ecommerce/shopping cart,
          o site search,
          o customer service/support,
          o tech support,
          o discussion forums,
          o newsletter,
          o catalog/information
          o order forms,
          o feedback form,
          o member logon,
          o password protected areas, and
          o SSL-encrypted areas. 

    * Information. Which informational elements should your site contain? Consider:
          o About Us page,
          o Contact Us page,
          o copyright notice, and
          o privacy statement. 

    * Structure. What is your site's hierarchy? For each of the 4-7 (though you can have more or less) main areas of the site, identify:
          o each main menu item,
          o all submenu items, and
          o additional content. 

      Think of a tree-style hierarchy with the home page at the top. 

Next Steps:

   1. Describe in detail each functional feature. What exactly will it do?
   2. Identify the resources required, and any technical and budgetary issues associated with each functional feature.
   3. Provide detail for each informational element.
   4. Assign content responsibilities to the resources identified above.

Two weeks ago I launched a new website at Brompt.com. It’s a web-based service for unreliable bloggers (like myself) that sends you an email if you haven’t posted to your blog in a while. It’s sort’ve like HassleMe

, except Brompt actively scans your blogs RSS feed to only send reminders when you’re lax (as opposed to just sending you a reminder every so often).

It’s very practical, but I also think Brompt is really interesting conceptually too. Everyone talks about RSS as just a means to aggregating content, but there is so much other interesting metadata in an RSS feed too.

Right now the site is just the barebones service, but I’m planning on adding some statistics and such so you can track your unreliability. It’s a fun project with a lot of possibilities.

Always interesting to see who is using Drupal for their website:

• John Birch Society

I’m very proud to be officially launching Panlexicon.com: a unique thesaurus. Using intuitive “tag clouds” to represent synonyms, Panlexicon makes discovering the word you want quick, easy and explorational.

Panlexicon’s current functions allow you to:

• First

  Albino Farm full

  , perform a lookup on a single word and receive a weighted cloud of synonyms.

• Second, view synonyms that overlap across multiple words either by entering the words manually, or clicking on words already in the cloud to further refine your search.

For example, performing a search on “cool” provides a wide variety of synonyms from “chilly”, to “unimpassioned”, to “groovy”. Refining the search using cool and nifty provides more refined synonyms.

By varying the size of the typeface, like tag clouds do, the most relevant terms pop out at you allowing you to quickly scan through large lists of words. Also, because the algorithm is a little fuzzy, you may run across related words that provide better context.

Panlexicon was developed jointly with Rebecca who originally proposed the project and did much of the research on thesauri and helped develop the word relevance algorithms.

The word lists come from the Moby Thesaurus as part of Project Gutenburg’s library of free electronic texts. Drupal is used as a simple framework for core functions such as database abstraction and page callbacks and to simplify future feature developments. Google AdSense is activated on the site, but that is due more to curiosity over the interplay of contextual advertising and the word lists than on any current revenue model.

I just got back from some extended travel in California where I met with some fellow AmeriCorps*VISTAs and, among other things, discussed how we could get our AmeriCorps social networking website growing even faster. Right now the site has over 300 registered users, which is pretty good for a six month old baby.

Most importantly, we’re working on stepping up our outreach. Unlike what some of the hype may tell you, social networking website don’t build themselves. If you build it, they won’t come, at least not if you don’t tell anyone about.

Outreach is key, and unfortunately it usually means a change of strategy. We’re building our networks online because it’s cheap real estate, but on the internet you can’t shout very far and most people are deaf. If you’re trying to get in front of someone’s face (or next to their ear), putting something on the internet is probably the worst way to go about it.

Physical objects are best

The Impostors dvdrip

, so I’m in the process of designing a postcard to mail out to AmeriCorps host organizations.

Also, because MeetAmeriCorps.com already has so many members across the country, we can have them lend a hand too in outreach activities. That’s always a benefit of working with AmeriCorps: we love to help.

My pet project, MeetAmeriCorps.com has finally passed that development milestone that marks a “social network”: Buddylists. To be a little more haute, we’ve decided to call them “contact lists”, but the concept is the same: you can demarcate people who you like/know/want-to-be-on-your-contact-list.

Since I haven’t really been advertising it too heavily, Meet AmeriCorps was a directory–now it’s a “social network”–of AmeriCorps and AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteers who are either currently serving or alumni. It’s pretty neat stuff, doesn’t look to shabby and, disclosing I am the lead developer on the project, actually kind’ve useful.

We put together MeetAmeriCorps.com to fill what I see as a sorely lacking need. AmeriCorps and VISTA are essentially-governmental, national-service programs that mostly places full-time, stipended volunteers with community organizations. AmeriCorps speaks of itself as a “network” that is creating a “national service movement”. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the capacity to truly achieve this because, in my opinion and experience, AmeriCorps and VISTA members generally do not:

1. communicate with other members serving with other organizations (even organizations inside a single community)
2. self-identify as AmeriCorps volunteers
3. collaborate on developing resources and capacity

AmeriCorps and VISTA currently provide some tools and resources to achieve #3, but I believe that #3 cannot be achieved with volunteers being able to effectively communicate and identify themselves as AmeriCorps both to each other and the outside world.

Meet AmeriCorps seeks to provide an easy-to-use tool for AmeriCorps members to meaningfully interact with one another both within service, and outside of it. I hope this will improve the experience of being an AmeriCorps or VISTA volunteer and contribute towards creating a true network and movement.

These screenshots were made with the OSX app Paparazzi!