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There’s a great scene from Shawshank Redemption, a great movie filled with great scenes, which has been on my mind recently. It’s where Red, played by Morgan Freeman, comes up for his parole hearing and, rather than give the same canned answer he thinks the parole board wants to hear, he drops on them the honest truth about how he feels, fully believing that it will do no good because he’s destined to stay locked up forever.
The truth of what he feels is that he wants to go back into the past and lay some wisdom on his earlier self:
It’s a moving scene: bare honesty from a man whose life has been defined by a single act that landed him in jail. It’s moving because it touches on a powerful and uniquely human wish: to relive our earlier lives with the benefit of wisdom we gain later in life. Quite frankly, it’s a wish that brought me to PICnet. I spent more than a decade in the nonprofit world with much of that time as accidental techie, struggling to do more with less, cobbling together ad hoc knowledge and tools to maximum effect. I’m proud of the work I did. I made a strong, honest effort and did some real good for the organizations I worked for. But I felt like a man on an deserted island setting up a lean to and calling it home. What brought me to PICnet several years ago was the desire to help nonprofits do more than just cobble together solutions. Nonprofits have missions worthy of more than just makeshift solutions. They deserve to house their efforts in something better than a lean to. I wanted to lend a hand in providing informed and elegant strategies and tools that addressed their technology needs so they could spend time focusing on their mission and less time reinventing the wheel with spare parts. That’s why it gives me such satisfaction to have launched the new Port Jobs website. Port Jobs is a fantastic organization increasing access to living wage jobs in Seattle and King County. It also happens to be a place I worked for several years as Web Manager / Bookkeeper / Database Administrator / Communications Manager / Whatever-else-needed-doing-that-day Guy. I had a long business card. Congrats to the good folks at Port Jobs! May your website treat you well and give you great delight in the ease and efficiency with which you can update it so you can focus on the great work you’re doing!
We love it when new tools we drop into Soapbox get picked up and put to good use by our clients. We love it so much that we think specific examples are worth a mention every now and then. Take Museum Without Walls, for example. They recently used a few tools that were added to Soapbox in February and March to do a little spring clean up of their site – all in just a few minutes. What did they do, exactly? First off, they added a brand new slide show to highlight the various programs they offer to educate and engage students in the fight against racism and intolerance. Second, they took a moment to add a customized page title to feature their tagline – Living History One Voice at a Time – in the address bar across their site and in search engine results. Third, they upgraded their site statistics by implementing the Google Analytics plugin so they can collect data not just on page views but file downloads and off-site links. And for a little bonus, they followed some advice shared at the latest Soapbox Salon and added a Facebook Fanbox to better integrate their site with their Facebook page. All in less than an afternoon. All following step-by-step instructions. All with Soapbox. Spring cleaning was never so easy. We’re happy to unveil the latest release of Soapbox 2 and introduce you to seven handy tools we dropped into the toolbox in the wee hours of the morning. Manage standard content more efficiently, reduce spam, mix up slideshow transitions, alert folks when they’re leaving your site, monitor the disk space you use, customize page not found errors, and maximize Google Analytics. Whew! That was a mouthful for just the overview. For the full details, check out our Help Desk and Happy Soapboxing! Know a developer interested in doing coding that helps change the world for the better? We’re looking for a programmer to help us with PHP-based development on custom projects and on our flagship CMS for nonprofits, Soapbox. Creative attitude, smarts, and a sense of humor required. Joomla experience a plus. Send letters, resumes, or recommendations to jobs-developers@picnet.net. The detailed job description’s after the break. Read more »
As noted last week, the overall project will see a total of five Sister Community sites launch this summer. These sites empower local Communities to craft their own message for their individual audiences while leveraging the common branding and shared experience on the Soapbox platform of the network as a whole. Sisters of Mercy are an international community of Roman Catholic women religious vowed to serve people who suffer from poverty, sickness and lack of education with a special concern for women and children. They are also a dear, long-standing client of PICnet’s. When they came to us looking to expand their web presence by creating sites for their five individual chapters throughout the country, we saw the perfect opportunity to leverage the power, flexibility, and elegance of the new Soapbox 2.0 platform to meet their needs. The West Midwest Chapter is the inaugural site to launch of these Sister sites with others scheduled to go live over the next few weeks. All sites make use of a handcrafted PICnet design customized to offer consistent branding across all project sites while offering Community-specific touches with color schemes and menu options. In early April 2009, we launched Soapbox 2.0, a system that allows organizations to enjoy the power of Joomla! 1.5 without needing to worry about common open source hurdles, like installation, hosting, and full-service support. It also consists of some awesome new components that Joomla! lacks out-of-the-box, such as our Taxonomy 1.0. Just 30 minutes ago, we officially launched Soapbox 2.0.4, which gave us an opportunity to improve some key functions within our Taxonomy extension. These improvements will make our Soapbox clients quite happy, and include key updates like the creation of hierarchical term (or tag) structure for your content with a slick implementation of RSS feeds per term. You can also change the view of the term to be like Joomla’s Category List Layout or Section Blog Layout. What does all this mean? It means that you can now provide several ways for your audience to view an article/page without duplication, maintain a list of terms/tags without overcrowding your tag cloud, and better meet your audience’s hunger for specific tag-specific information. Enjoy it! I know these folks will – Behind the Green. |
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