Dear Readers,

It has been many months since we launched our Google Sites competition, and finally, not only are we pleased to announce its results, we’re pleased to showcase the winning (live) site!

Who Won?

The winning website: http://www.thewayhomenh.org/
The winner: Jesse Pinho of Pinho Designs

The process has been much longer and complex, and filled with good Thai food, than we had ever imagined. I’ll write an overview of the competition and results, and will ask both the winner, Jesse, and Nonprofit representative, Barbara, to contribute their thoughts. There are a number of important lessons in this success, which I will detail below.

The Competition - What happened? Tell me more!

Initial entries to the competition were low - the word takes a long time to get out, on the web. So, by our final deadline, we have a total of three entries. Since that time, we have received handfuls of new entries, even though the deadline is long past!

However, once the winner was selected, the real challenge began - converting The Way Home NH’s existing site into a new website.There were two parts to this challenge: design and content.

Building a site on Google Sites is fraught with specific challenges, mainly brought about by the way that Sites handles templates, colors and CSS entered though its HTML editor. Limitations in layout, color and design, and CSS work together to create a series of constraints that must be worked-through, or within. I’ll let Jesse describe that in more detail, as he built the interface.

Once the design was completed, Barbara worked with her staff to develop content. The approval process was lengthy, time was short, and it took about two months to pull together the content to populate the site.

Perhaps the simplest part of all, however, was training. Initially, there was concern about using the WYSIWYG interface to build a site — but I think (perhaps Barbara will respond?) that editing was easier than anticipated. More on that, soon!

In the meantime, please view the winning website: http://www.thewayhomenh.org/ and congratulate the winner, Jesse, for his great work, determination and kind assistance!

Cheers,

–Dave

All,

I’ve been playing with Yahoo Pipes for a website called CT Nation, http://ctnation.citizenschools.net that’s based on DotNetNuke.

Yahoo Pipes is a powerful composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.

Here’s a brief tutorial:

This basically means that you can aggregate RSS feeds and other XML data, along with input that you define. In our case, our simple implementation is to weave together the various feeds related to Citizen Schools, and display them in a single feed.

We’ve had, and overcome, a challenge: our mashup displaying inappropriate words! Of course, when trolling the web for RSS feeds related to Citizen Schools, inappropriate content does appear.

The solution is a ‘bad word filtering’ Yahoo Pipe that can be easily connected to existing Pipe output to suppress unwanted content.

Once you’ve build your main pipe, copy and paste its Feed URL into the Bad Word Filtering pipe, and volila - you have sanitized output!

Make it a clean(er) day,

–Dave

Hey there, media mongers!

Let’s face it: we all want to know how we’re doing in the public eye. From time to time, it’s not just important to feel good by thinking we know the hype that surrounds us; it’s important to actually know what that hype says!

The way to find out what web-based hype is saying is through the practice of brand and social media monitoring. Social media monitoring takes advantage of the reams and uber-reams of information available online and places it, in a digestible way, at your fingertips.

Brand and social media monitoring includes tracking blogs, forum comments, search engine placement, live hits to your site (including origin) and more - depending on what statistics are available to you. As you build your campaigns, monitoring all outlets will help you refine your practice, extend your reach and mobilize a greater number of individuals for your cause.

Typically, there are services that can help you, for a fee, monitor your brand and related media; others have suggestions for free monitoring. We’re going to show you how to monitor for free, but moreover, how to replicate the features available through most high-price monitoring packages.

The Hardware Setup:

1. Depending on the intensity with which you want to monitor, I suggest setting up a second computer (or a second screen) to keep you and your staff constantly up-to-date. This is especially useful if you’re building a specific media campaign that you need to track, and don’t want to distract yourself from your normal work. The second machine becomes a “heads-up” display for your media monitoring. Your only limitation is screen size.
2. Whether its PC or Mac, be sure you have Widget software installed. Yahoo offers good, free widget software for the PC and the Dashboard for OSX (built-in) is perfect. Widgets will become your perfect platform for monitoring.
3. Be sure you have Google Analytics installed on your website(s). Google Analytics is a simple, free and powerful web tracking software that gives you information about your web traffic, users, and the content that’s most (or least) popular.
4. If necessary, build a campaign page to funnel individuals into supporting a specific, important social cause [example]

Software Setup:

Using your Widget software, install widgets that track:

• Google Analytics (Mac | PC) to show unique website traffic or page visits, as desired.
• Track the Blogsphere (Mac | PC) by creating custom searches on Bloglines.com. Search for any keywords [example] on Bloglines (remember: use quotes to create phrases) and then look on the right side of the search results for the RSS link [example]. Copy and paste the RSS link into your reader, and there you have it: customize blog monitoring! Add multiple widgets and searches to monitor multiple keywords. Readers that can handle multiple feeds are particularly valuable to monitoring.
• Identify relevant discussion forums, and if supported, add relevant RSS feeds to your monitoring software.
• Create and track your own Blog on Wordpress.com - beyond the scope of this short article, but important outreach nonetheless! (If you do have a blog, make sure it’s optimized through Feedburner).
• Monitor your Twitter accounts (Mac)
• Monitor Social Boomarking sites, including Digg (Mac, PC)

Monitoring these multiple lines of communication will give you more information than you can handle - a great start! The challenge is planning and revising your outreach - the topic of our next article (look for it soon)!

Cheers and happy widgeting in the New Year,

–Dave

… to cast, on Change.org, your vote for education. When you vote, cast a vote for Citizen Schools, which provides tremendous opportunities to children across the country.

From the text:

At Citizen Schools (www.citizenschools.org), we have seen that children can accomplish great things when they have more time to learn, more caring adults, and more hands-on learning that engages them. A decade of evidence shows that when disadvantaged students spend their afternoons on well-structured academics and real-world learning projects with community members, they outperform their peers across the board.  Our students graduate from high school and go on to 4-year colleges at significantly higher rates than their peers.

We can expand these successful strategies by passing the Serve America Act and the TIME Act - legislation introduced in Congress in 2008.  We can also build from the proven models of Citizen Schools, Experience Corps, Big Brothers/Big Sisters and others to recruit engineers, artists, web designers and more who can teach what they know and love.  These Citizen Teachers could serve as a second shift of educators with the potential to dramatically lift student learning and engagement.

Disclaimer: I was a Citizen Teacher in Austin, Texas and taught web design to a group of really great middle schoolers. So, you could say that I’m biased

Cheers,

–Dave

Greetings, busy people!

I’d like to share a confession with you. Up until recently, I spent too much time checking my e-mail, website statistics and the status of our various blogs and pieces of software. Way too much time. And what’s more is that all that time detracted from productivity to the tune of at least an hour per day.

But you know, life gives us new opportunities, and recently, one arrived at my deskstep in the form of a MacBook Pro. Not only was this a new lease on computing, it provided an opportunity to rethink how I managed my inbound information to maximize productivity and minimize on wasted time.

And in starting anew, I wanted to be thoughtful and mindful of my productivity, such that:

• I could monitor multiple communications and information lines at once (e-mail, calendars, website statuses, and our internal blogs)
• I was able to collaborate with team members more effectively
• I could get more things done more easily, period.

What follows will be a frequently-updated list of what I’ve found to be simple and useful; some things will be unique to Mac (sorry, PC users, but please consider switching anyway) and others will be easily transferable.

A. E-Mail

Let’s face it. We waste a lot of time e-mailing these days. And so in recreating my various inboxes on the new machine, I needed to find a better way to handle my inbox, rather than let my inbox man-handle me! To start, I created dozens of rules to route e-mail to the correct place, and to polish it off, I’m viewing e-mail by thread. Here’s a very good post on threads and rules-based e-mailing.

Oh - and all that spam? Create a different e-mail account, perhaps on g-mail, and use it for online ordering and whatnot - you won’t regret it!

B. Calendar Sync

Calendar synchronization is a pain, but thanks to Google Calendar, I can share schedules between my iCal-based calendar using BusySync, and my Exchange calendars using the Google Calendar Sync Utility. In fact, I have three different calendars that synchronize: an iCal that syncs (eventually) with an Exchange calendar, and an iCal that syncs with other PLML conspirators’ iCal calendars. Talk about helpful! Now, the hard part is making sure my calendar is up-to-date and strict.

C. OSX Widgets

OSX provides something called a Dashboard, which essentially provides a small application overlay to the desktop. These all pop up with the push of a hotkey, which means that no time is spent pulling up web pages or switching applications. And although many widgets are a waste of time (games, games, games), some are very useful for extending productivity. In my case, I’m using a bunch:

• A RSS reader for showing status updates about our internal blogs (such as this one) that I would normally need to check several times per day
• A RSS reader for showing status updates about the reach/hype/talk of our free products in the external world through a Bloglines search RSS feed
• An application called Dashalytics for tracking web statistics for our domains
• An application called The Daily Grind for time tracking
• A BaseCamp monitoring application called Telescope, (this no longer seems to work; as far as I can tell, no BC monitoring apps exist in a working state for Mac Dashboard)
• An iCal display, iCalEvents 2.3
• My feedburner stats on the Feedburner Widget 1.1.1

D. Task Tracking

This seems to be my currently challenge - tracking and syncing task status across multiple spaces, including this Mac and my other PC machines. iCal, Mac Mail and a Widget called the DoBeDo seem to synchronize, but currently, this doesn’t work across spaces (to Exchange, for instance) nor does it work deeply (tasks that have several elements, for instance). So, expect more information about this as exploration continues!

Update: This post provides a good comparison of project management and task tracking software. Issue seems to be that it’s expensive and many packages don’t play well with iCal or Tasks. Sheesh!

Update 2: Just began using Things, which looks promising. However, no word on how tightly this integrates with my calendar or to-do lists yet. Their 1.0 version is due out in January…

E. Other Interesting Tools for the Effective Roadwarrior:

Drop.io is a service that I’ve been using to receive incoming faxes, no matter my location. It has a very unique, interesting and effective model for sharing and storage, among other things.

Cheers & happy organizing,

–Dave / CK

Greetings graphically-inclined Friend Connectors,

Now that the Friend Connect phase has hit and the early adopters are in, let’s move into some customization. The standard theme is pretty boring:

So here are six theme shots with complimentary colors and color information that you can use to customize in a new direction:

1. Woodland

2. Volcano

3. Parade

4. Seashore

5. Brick

6. Serenity

Notes on Use:

These themes will get you started in matching the Google Friend Connect color scheme to your site or blog… but are really a start. I’m thankful to Google for designing a relatively simple way to include this functionality into a site (for instance, in comparison to Facebook’s similar application, which is complex). On the other hand, its block-look seems somewhat dated in the world of rounded edges and brushed metal. It would be GREAT if:

1. Users were able to select the style (rounded or not) for the edges
2. Font and image size were selectable and editable (as well as font weight) 
3. The Google Friend Connect logo appeared below the bottom color block, rather than above, which is rather abrupt