Dennis P. Osorio's Blog

Creating WordPress Themes

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. [...]

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Getting started with Salesforce

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 [...]

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KPDF dissing DRM, easy copying, pasting and saving a breeze

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, [...]

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JQuery Cycle Plugin

Here’s a very cool slideshow framework that I found. It’s called JQuery Cycle Plugin. It offers so many cool effects! Don’t even think of Microsoft’s PowerPoint (hey, what’d I just tell you!) I’m working on something that incorporates it & I’m so jazzed. I can’t wait for its unveiling! It a plug-in to something called, JQuery. [...]

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Microsoft Software, Open Source Alternatives

You’re thinking about moving to Linux, or you recently have done so, and you’re wondering, “what is the Linux or open source alternative to xxx software I loved when I used Windows?” This has got to be one of the most common questions for Linux users. A lot of this software has dominated our ways of [...]

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Easy Breezy and Free Remote Access

While I was assisting a friend and client with the setup of his new email account, I was frustrated that I couldn’t simply access his computer remotely. “Whoa, hold on there”, he said. “Go to LogMeIn.com” I was skeptical because I was using a computer running Linux and sometimes weird web apps don’t play nicely with [...]

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Where I blog about blogging.

So, uh, I’m new to this whole blogging thing. But, I recently attended a “Blogger Summit” hosted by Center for Civic Policy. Below are some of the tips (style, soliciting comments, strategy) I picked up from folks who know a lot more about this than me. General Style tips: Short paragraphs - you’re not writing your magnum [...]

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Harassing the Powers that Be

At 1000 Friends of New Mexico, I experimented with two free solutions that should be of interest to folks wanting to initiate sign-on letters or petitions to legislators. CitizenSpeak (my favorite) Change.org (not bad, but with some downsides) First, we created a letter using CitizenSpeak that we wanted our members and supporters to sign on to. Then, it was [...]

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Spoof website

Here’s a great example of web activism. Upset with absurd attempts by the coal industry to clean up it’s image (rather than it’s smokestacks), the National Resource Defense Council created a spoof website. Who’s to say that you have to take corporate disinformation lying down? The original is found here: http://www.americaspower.org/ (boo! hiss!) The spoof is found [...]

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Why Ubuntu rules and Windows drools

Ubuntu, for those of you who may not know, is a flavor of Linux. There is no one single Linux, but a zillion varieties. Ubuntu is one of the most popular distributions (if not the most popular). For the fearful Windows users out there, let me tell you: it’s graphical, it has windows, and [...]

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