Quick Update

Discovered that background images don’t show up properly in most major webmail clients; also most of them don’t like positioning. Surprisingly, AOL reads both of them correctly, but since none of the others do (hotmail, gmail, yahoo), the nifty little quote graphics Michael (new intern) made will only be used on the website for the moment. You’ll see them show up next week.

Website: You can now join our email list directly from the site, on any page, in the upper right corner. I’ve also reworked the videos, so there are 3 in the sidebar now (youtube’s interface used to not resize very well to the size we needed, but they fixed it recently), and you can see all of them on our video page. It’s just a custom player/playlist from youtube – if you want to make your own, it’s point and click, you just need a youtube account with some videos uploaded.

Last week was very busy – I was here late a couple nights getting all the materials ready for CTV’s trip to Mackinac for the Republican Leadership Conference.

James did an interview with someone for Michael Jefferies’ position last week also, so hopefully we’ll get someone in here soon.

Phillip Boggs, for those of you who know him, is coming back to the states briefly next month I believe, then planning on going back to Peru for two more years of medical work.

Outside SSI/CTV: I’ve got another website that I’ll hopefully start working on next week – I’ll give some details once I have some details. The most recent one I did was www.mickimagee.com.

I’m still trying to sell my house – if anyone knows anyone interested in purchasing a home in Lansing – 4 bedrooms, 1800+ square feet, hardwood floors, fireplace, 2 living rooms, full-size basement and attic, nice neighborhood – please have them get in touch with me. It’s been vacant for nearly a year now and I’m willing to work with people on price, financing, etc.

Changes

So, summer camp took so much time, I haven’t been keeping this up. Awhile ago, I’m not sure if I intended to – I just wanted to figure out the WordPress engine a little, see what I could do with it.

Now, I think I may start this back up again, trying hard to give people a real inside/backstage look at what goes on around here, as well as possibly some non-SSI-related work projects.

Changes:
* Emily and Michael got married and moved to Taiwan. You can read their blog (pictures, video, diary) here, and you can keep in touch with them through comments on that site, or their email (I’ll try to get Michael to put it up on his website?).
* Amy and Ashley (from CTV) have both taken on part of Michael’s responsibilities part-time, as an interim measure until we replace Michael’s full-time position with a new employee.
* Nate is now a paid part-time staff for both CTV and SSI, splitting his hours.
* I am also switching my hours to 20 a week for SSI and 20 a week for CTV, to give CTV some more manpower during the upcoming election year (I’ll be doing website/email/communications/administration work).
* And we have two new unpaid interns, Michael, who started this week – he’s in 3 days a week, and has started by helping me design a promotional email for the Ambassador League program; and Erin, who started a couple months back, and is in 2 days a week, and helps with general administration and data entry.

Big Projects I’ve done recently:
* Installed a new domain server. I had never done it before, learned a bit.
* New email list management system is up and running – now automated to save me an afternoon of work every week.

Big Projects I’m doing shortly:
* New backup system
* Upgrading user machines (both hardware/software)
* Migrating SSI website to new server

Worklog for the week of June 18th

So busy this week prepping for SSI. Too much stuff going on. No time to write. Too tired to write. Will pick up Monday with notes on the first week of summer camp.

Worklog for June 14th & 15th

I didn’t have the chance to track closely these couple days – I spent a bunch of time on the CTV email (being sent out today), updating both websites with little things, some database work, more on the big CTV data project (transferring data from the old database to the new one), a little business track work, and all Friday afternoon was spent on network issues (we had a friend of James’ who is a professional network installer come in to help us set up our new server – unfortunately our current system is apparently set up improperly, so it’s going to be more work than he thought, and he won’t have time in his schedule to do it until August, so our upgrades are going to wait until then – the problem with many non-profits: nobody on staff that knows how to do something, no money to pay anyone, so relying on volunteer work, while good, sometimes means waiting for their schedule to open up to get work done).

Worklog for June 13th

Well, I spent the first 45 minutes of the day yesterday (the 13th) installing Windows XP to my computer. I spent the rest of the day trying to get my computer to work again. I left being unsuccessful – I couldn’t log into my profile, couldn’t log into any roaming profile, couldn’t keep the drives mapped, nothing would connect to the server, my network card went from 1000mpbs to 100mpbs and the machine was 10 times slower doing anything than it was before.

I came in this morning (Thursday the 14th), reset the domain connection, and now everything seems to be fine. I reset the domain connection 3 times yesterday and nothing. My card is still 100mpbs and should be 1000, I don’t know why it hasn’t changed back.

So, it works, but I have no idea what was wrong or what fixed it. I’m happy about the former, not so much about the latter, since I have a dozen computers to do this with and don’t really want to waste a day screwing around with them not knowing what I’m doing.

Now, I’m going to throw Office 2007 on here, and hope that doesn’t mess it up again!

Worklog for June 12th

09:00-09:45 – Updating CTV website
09:45-11:00 – CTV Newsletter editing
11:00-11:45 – SSI Staff Meeting
11:45-12:20 – Lunch (CTV web news research)
12:20-01:30 – CTV Newsletter editing
01:30-02:10 – CTV Staff Meeting
02:10-02:50 – Importing donor gift data to database
02:50-03:20 – Mtg. w/James on CTV website direction
03:20-05:00 – CTV Newsletter editing
05:00-05:35 – Updating Business website

Improving Technology Saves Time and Money

Well, we’re trying to get up to speed with the rest of the world, technologically speaking. Evolution vs. Intelligent Design vs. Creationism is a hot topic right now, so permit me this analogy: our company is in the stone age and newer for-profit businesses are operating in the 22nd century. But we’re trying, and fortunately have received a grant to jump us ahead an epoch or two.

Many of our computers are Pentium I or II with 256M of RAM. Some of our machines have 6 gig hard drives. We just got our first DVD burner last fall, and it was donated to us. I’ve got the interns working on machines with 128M of RAM and 10mbps network cards. We have one server running our domain, databases, files, email. Our backup system keeps failing. Our web host space is filled, and we’re still on a frontpage server. On a less hardware-centric side, we’re not using any kind of project management software, and I think that hurts us in the time management and deadline department; also nobody is capable of working from outside the office without GoToMyPC.com, a pay service to connect you to a remote computer. Personally, I find those services slow and clunky, but I would love to have all my email, project management and files available online so I could work from home, or from anywhere, if necessary. A lot of businesses do that now, and I think our main hurdle with that is our database, because the software we use with it doesn’t have an online version. Our email list management is horribly outdated – I have to manually look at bounces in my inbox and remove them from our database after they’ve bounced 3 times in a row.

Here’s the good news:
We’re buying some new computers (3) – I’m not a hardware expert, so I’m just waiting on a friend of mine to take a look at what I spec’d and let me know if it’s good to go or not, then I’m ordering them. They’ll be core 2 duo with 2gig RAM and 80gig hard drives and 800mhz FSB. It will be a great upgrade for James, Michael and myself, and will last for a few years without becoming obsolete. Our machines will move down the chain and replace the super low-end ones the interns are using.

We’ve got a second server in the office, just came in. We’re having someone in the next couple weeks that is a network specialist help set it up (I’m not a network expert either – they hired me for database and web programming, although I spend most of my time doing other stuff actually). It’s top-of-the-line and will run our domain, firewall and act as a file server, and our databases will stay on the current server, splitting the load on everything.

I started yesterday looking at online backup systems, and hope to have something picked out and implemented very soon, because our backup is not good at the moment.

I have the go ahead to migrate our web server; I have one thing to clear up beforehand (James has a personal address through our current host that he wants to keep, so I have to figure out what the cost is and how that’s going to happen) and then I just have to find a day to take care of it all.

We are looking at mail list options right now – I was hoping to have one set up by now, but we’ll have one soon, and it will all be automated, saving me hopefully an entire day of work every week (spent editing/creating the email, then sending it [25 at a time], then processing bounces manually).

So, with the email system we’ll be saving 20% of my time (James can create/send it himself; bounces processed automatically); with an automated backup we’ll be saving my time; with new computers 3 of us will be saving time just from the speed increase on the machines; with the server everyone will be saving time from the speed increase; with the web host changed, there will be no lag time on needing something done and getting something done (I’ll have access to everything!); and hopefully once all that is accomplished, we can find a good project management system that will save us more time across the board as well.

I really want to spend my time on these things… at the moment, I’m working on business track items, SSI registration, getting old computers in working condition for our students to use, and in 12 days we start camp… so I’m not sure what the timeline is going to be on any of this stuff. Hopefully sooner than later.

Worklog for June 11th

08:45-08:55 – merged records in database
08:55-09:10 – updated speakers page on SSI website
09:10-10:10 – SSI webspace filled – had to go through files and delete items from remote host
10:10-11:00 – Reading email; spoke with Jeff about recording schedule/computer issues; obtaining licenses for software we purchased
11:00-11:40 – Finished Business Manual editing and sent to Sherrel
11:40-01:50 – Tech Meeting w/James & Jeff – discussed various backup options
01:50-02:20 – Lunch
02:20-05:10 – Researching Backup, filing system and email options to reduce space on our server

So, we’re wanting to move to an online backup system if possible (bandwidth allowing). Any suggestions? I’m also going to try getting all the content from my outlook profile into Gmail. I’ve heard that contacts in Gmail aren’t that great yet. If anyone knows of any addons that will take care of that, please let me know, as we can’t get rid of outlook if any functional interactivity between mail/calendar/contacts is lost.

Worklog for June 8th

09:00-09:30 – Read/responded to email
09:30-11:00 – Updated SSI website; Prepared Friday Facts email
11:00-12:00 – Sent Friday Facts
12:00-01:00 – Lunch outside the office today
01:00-03:30 – Sent Friday Facts
03:30-04:10 – Checking analytics for SSI; trying to get them installed for CTV
04:10-04:30 – Writing post for business track site
04:30-05:00 – CTV website update

You might note that it takes a few hours to send out our email list: this is because we’re still using antiquated software that only allows us to send 25 emails at a time, because AOL blocks our email if we send it out through our email provider instead of our ISP, but the ISP says AOL doesn’t block our email, and we should contact our email provider about it, except they say it’s not their fault and we should talk to AOL, except AOL says it has nothing to do with them and we should contact our ISP…so, I have to click “send” in our email management program every 40-50 seconds or so, until it has gone through the whole list.

Another week has gone by and I haven’t had time to migrate the website to the new hosting service, or get the analytics installed on CTV’s website… I need an assistant – if you’re interested in interning with us send an app and say you want to do tech and web stuff.

Worklog for June 7th

09:00-09:30 – Read/responded to email; updated SSI speakers page
09:30-10:20 – Data correction work in database
10:20-10:50 – Phone meeting with Gary Britten, Business Track Instructor
10:50-11:30 – Edited Business Manual
11:30-12:30 – Created Business Track website
12:30-01:00 – CTV web research
01:00-01:30 – Lunch
01:30-02:30 – Edited Business Manual and other materials
02:30-03:10 – Wrote instructions to Business Coaches and emailed
03:10-03:20 – Spoke with business coach on the phone
03:20-03:35 – Created business track schedule and uploaded to business website
03:35-04:20 – Wrote instructions to Business Students and emailed (called a few that I didn’t have emails for)
04:20-05:00 – Updated CTV website

Miscellaneous:
Updated database software
Signed CTV up for google analytics (I have no footer file, so I have to create one and get it into every page on the site before it will work – hope to have it done by tomorrow)