Dennis P. Osorio’s Blog
Technology, E-Activism, and Other Items of Interest
Archive for October, 2008
October 16, 2008 at 4:47 pm · Filed under blogging, web design and development
There are many advantages to building a site on top of WordPress. RSS. Blogging. Calendaring. Simple editing done by authors rather than by a webmaster. Plugins like: ShareThis; Secure Form Mailer; Akismet; Wordpress Automatic Upgrade; and many others. For nonprofits, this means a site can be built and handed over to the organization to update. That as the world moves and plugins develop, your site moves with it.
I have personally struggled a bit trying to decipher how WordPress sites are put together. The folks at WPDesigner.com put together a great series of articles that instruct users how to create WordPress themes from scratch. Finally, the veil is lifted.
October 16, 2008 at 2:48 pm · Filed under CRM
I am looking to implement a CRM for my workplace. Why are we bothering at all? Here are our goals (draft):
- to consolidate and make available contacts which are stored in each staffer’s Outlook
- to create a platform where membership information can be kept and used as needed
- membership information will track geography, issue identification, events attended, levels of engagement, organizational affiliations
- be able to perform mass emailing like action alerts
- be able to generate address labels, call-lists, walk-lists
- possibly store our organizational “story bank”
- keep media contacts
- store donor information
My first impressions of Salesforce have filled me with dread. It’s certainly not an out-of-the-box CRM, at least not for our purposes. I have found myself repeatedly looking at SugarCRM and vTiger to see if they might be easier to implement. But, for now I will proceed on faith. After all, the smart and reputable folks over at OneNW have a lot of good things to say about Saleforce.
The first thing I learned, thanks to this blog, was to create a developer account, rather than a trial non-profit account. The reason being that it doesn’t expire unlike the 30-day trial. I do also have a non-profit 30 day trial, so hopefully, I can learn everything I can to move forward.
October 7, 2008 at 9:14 pm · Filed under linux software
In an earlier post, I wrote about the joys of linux, specifically Ubuntu. Just a quick expansion here.
KPDF has two features that are just so great. When using the “Select Tool” you can draw a rectangle over a selection and are given options for saving: text with copy to clipboard; image with copy to clipboard, image with save to file. Oh, and under the settings menu, you can ask it to disregard any foolish DRM limitations.
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