The. End. (for now)

by Michelle Murrain on July 25, 2011

I’ve been thinking about the purpose of this blog in my life for the last few months. I started blogging specifically on technology just over 6 years ago, took about a year hiatus in 2005-2006, and have been writing consistently here ever since. But the time has come for me to stop.

Mostly, it’s because I’ve run out of things to say. On one hand, the technology issues I cover are well covered elsewhere. There are some amazingly good blogs out there focused on the use of Drupal and other open source tools. You don’t need to hear from me about the newest web tools – you have ReadWriteWeb and Mashable for that, among others.

On strictly NPTech topics, I can only say “nonprofits should use open source software for better sustainability,” “there’s more to talk about than social media,” and “all nonprofit software should have open APIs,” and “technology won’t save the world,”  and “the nptech world should develop open standards,” and “nonprofits should collaboratively develop software,” so many times. I know that this isn’t falling totally on deaf ears, but some days it does feel that way. And I’m kinda tired and bored of sounding like a broken record, so I will stop rotating now. And besides, the landscape has changed somewhat – in some ways better, in some ways worse.

I’ll still be building websites (and their successors) for the foreseeable future with Drupal, and perhaps with whichever cool, new open source development framework comes next after Drupal becomes irrelevant (it will, eventually). And I’ll be Google+ing (rather than Tweeting, which is mostly for my writing, or Facebooking, which is friends/family) interesting Tech and NPTech topics as they come along and are discussed. And when Google+ stops being relevant, I’ll find the next thing that comes along to share links and ideas and discuss. But for now, and until I change my mind (I like to keep my options open), this blog will be inactive.

Was this blog a success? I don’t know how to answer. Perhaps you can tell me in comments. For a good while, I had a lot of fun doing it. I hope I was at least a little helpful. Those are enough for me.

For the curious (well, OK, it was mostly me who was curious):

There are 409 posts and 922 comments. Since since September 2007 when I started to use analytics, there have been 151,000 ish unique page views, and 106,000ish unique visitors.  The most popular pages are (these are fascinating!):

  1. The home page
  2. LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice.org
  3. CRM and CMS Integration: Blackbaud Raiser’s Edge and NetCommunity
  4.  WordPress vs. Drupal… Fight!
  5. What is Cloud Computing?

 

 

 

{ 4 comments }

Interesting sites I’m looking at (weekly)

by Michelle Murrain on July 17, 2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Interesting sites I’m looking at (weekly)

by Michelle Murrain on July 10, 2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Interesting sites I’m looking at (weekly)

by Michelle Murrain on June 19, 2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Interesting sites I’m looking at (weekly)

by Michelle Murrain on June 12, 2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Interesting sites I’m looking at (weekly)

by Michelle Murrain on June 5, 2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Why all (major) operating systems suck

by Pearlbear on June 2, 2011

I’ve been a user of a ton of operating systems over time. In the past ten years, I have been an everyday user of the big three, Windows, Mac OS, and Linux, for long stretches of time. I switched from Apple to Windows/Linux last year, and I’ve largely been OK with it, but I’ve complained enough about all three that I realized that they all suck.

Of course, they suck for completely different reasons, which is part of the frustration. And each have places where they shine. Why can’t there be a nice combination of all three? That would be perfect.

Why Mac OS X sucks:

  • Apple is becoming a controlling, closed system, and with the advent of the Apple App store, developers have to go through an approval process to get their apps on the store, there are specific things you can’t include in an app in the store, and there will come a time when most people get their software through the store, so there will be less and less incentive to maintain non-app store versions of software apps
  • These days, you can find most kinds of software for the Mac, but there still is a relative paucity of apps in comparison to Windows.

Why Windows sucks:

  • Viruses, Trojans and Worms, Oh My!
  • Although I have only seen the Blue Screen of Death once in my year of Windows 7 use, there are still inexplicable slow-downs, crashes, and weird problems. And it takes FOREVER to boot, even with Soluto.
  • Internet Explorer

Why Linux (in my case Ubuntu) sucks:

  • I have to go through arcane (and luckily for me, fairly painless) procedures to get simple things to work (like plugging a headset with a mic into my jack!)
  • Hardware manufacturers ignore Linux for the most part
  • Most software developers don’t make Linux versions

The only good news I can see is that the operating system is getting less and less relevant. And, on balance, for me, Linux is winning. Now that dropbox and scrivener work on Linux, and I’m moving from Quicken to some online cloudish thing (suggestions?), I can pretty much leave Windows behind. (Oh, there is still Netflix. Sigh.)

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{ 9 comments }

Interesting sites I’m looking at (weekly)

by Michelle Murrain on May 29, 2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Real Social CRM

by Pearlbear on May 24, 2011

So I do have social media ennui, but I am also somewhat of a data geek, and cool ways of moving social media data into one’s nonprofit data workflow is pretty important in my most humble opinion. This post on Social CRM is not going to contain one buzz phrase. It’s going to talk about one particular, interesting example of how to move social media data into a real live CRM -the one you might even be using now – Salesforce.

This example uses an app from the Salesforce AppExchange, called “Salesforce for Facebook and Twitter.” To make things just a tad confusing, this is also called “Salesforce for Social Media” and “Salesforce for Twitter.”

There are likely many more options, but this is one I’ve seen that is pretty cool, although it has its weak spots. It definitely is geared more toward the “Service Cloud” than the “Sales Cloud.”

You can set up multiple twitter and facebook accounts, and each facebook account can have access to multiple pages. It’s all done via OAuth, which is cool. Once you set up the accounts, you can then grab conversations:

You can filter and sort, just like records in any other SF object. You can choose whether or not to send Twitter or Facebook identities to Leads, Contacts, or Person Accounts. You can choose to create cases from tweets or FB posts as well.

You can tweet or post to facebook directly from Salesforce:

And it works:

You can schedule tweets and facebook posts as well.

There is a lot more you can do – it’s a pretty cool tool. The one thing I can’t seem to find – and I don’t know whether this is in development, or they won’t ever do it – is import your social graph into salesforce – your facebook fans or your twitter followers. I’m not sure why this is, exactly. It seems a big gap to me. But then, it is the folks who engage with you who you definitely want to make sure to keep track of.

Anyway, if you are a user of either Salesforce, the Nonprofit Starter Pack, or Convio Common Ground, this is definitely a tool to know about.

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{ 2 comments }

Interesting sites I’m looking at (weekly)

by Michelle Murrain on May 22, 2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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