WebSage

New website for Slow Food DC

WebSage — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 01:55:33 +0000

Today, after a very fruitful collaboration with a talented team of volunteers, I launched the newly redesigned website for Slow Food DC, which is the Washington, DC metropolitan area chapter of Slow Food. It’s mission is very worthwhile, “Supporting Good, Clean, and Fair Food”, and I was delighted to assist them.

I got involved with this project after an old friend of mine, Alexandra Greeley, suggested my services to the chair woman of Slow Food DC, Kati Gimes. Before you know it, I was consulting with a group of young dedicated volunteers, many of whom have done wonderful work in website redesign or social media management for other DC-based non-profits, themselves.

During our meetings, we discussed the content strategy, the target audiences, the information architecture, and the technological platform. A young Photoshop aficionado took upon herself to design the banner incorporating the new Slow Food DC logo.

The site uses the new WordPress theme twentyone which is extremely powerful. It utilizes plug-ins for Google Analytics, Twitter and RSS feeds. It truly is a marvelous content management system which will burden of needing a webmaster any time a new content update is needed.

Congratulations, Slow Food DC! Cheers!

Getting closer to a universal semantic web

WebSage — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 19:16:33 +0000

Back in 1999, when Tim Berners-Lee publushed his seminal book Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, the references to the “The Semantic Web” were mostly to describe the original CERN information management experiment from 1989-1990 which lead to the invention of the World Wide Web. Just as Sir Berners-Lee’s book was being published, Google was hatching out from an academic idea to a company which would take over the world, and would implement many of those brave ideas.

Today, Google purchased Metaweb, a company with a revolutionary idea which will get us a step closer to that original vision of a universal semantic web:

Books for my BI team

WebSage — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 22:00:28 +0000

And here is a last minute addition to the reading list for my BI team. Clearly we are not cutting edge but getting there

Inside Microsoft SQL Server 2005: T-SQL Programming (Pro-Developer)

Expert SQL Server 2005 Integration Services (Programmer to Programmer)

Reading list on SQL Server 2008 and Web Analytics 2.0

WebSage — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:25:00 +0000

Here is a list of books I am to get for my team:

Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability and Science of Customer Centricity

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Integration Services (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

Professional Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Administration (Wrox Programmer to Programmer)

Do you have any other recommendations?

Opting out of behavioral advertising

WebSage — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 17:44:50 +0000

Today I was reading an article on NYTimes.com and noticed on the side a list of additional suggested reading for those interested in non-profit management, courtesy of LinkedIn. Of course this can be valuable but the fact that LinkedIn shares information about my employment with NYTimes was nothing I had considered when signing up with LinkedIn years ago.

If you find this, or other similar scenarios annoying, here is a valuable tool to opt out of behavioral advertising networks, link courtesy of Jim Stearne!

CSS framework

WebSage — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 18:50:22 +0000

Spend your time innovating, not replicating with the CSS Blueprint framework.

Automatic anti-spam email encoder

WebSage — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:56:13 +0000

A team member shared with me this wonderful encoder form which takes an email address and uses JavaScript to replace a mailto link with something usable for humans but disabling spam spiders:

http://hivelogic.com/enkoder/form

New site on spiritual education

WebSage — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 19:24:47 +0000

Northern Virginia parents and children alike have a new valuable resource dedicated to spiritual education based on the Baha’i Writings:

Spiritual-Education.net

The site features a beautiful Sakura theme of WordPress and quotes Baha’u'llah’s famous words:

“Regard man as a mine rich in gems of inestimable value. Education can, alone, cause it to reveal its treasures, and enable mankind to benefit therefrom.” – Bahá’u’lláh, Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá’u’lláh, p. 260

And a beautiful new site for the Baha’is of Bulgaria

WebSage — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 16:48:48 +0000

Nickolai has outdone himself once again. This silent hero who introduced me to Dreamweaver way back in 1998 and has labored steadfastly on translating Baha’u'llah’s Writings into Bulgarian and establishing the first Baha’i website in Bulgarian has launched a beautiful new Bulgarian Baha’i website!

The content is based on “The Baha’is” publication and seems to be built on the Joomla content management system. That should free the hands of the small but enthusiastic Baha’i community of Bulgaria to do what it does the best — sharing with its compatriots the healing message of Baha’u'llah!

New Firefox and newly redesigned Baha’i Prayers site

WebSage — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 17:00:07 +0000

I just installed the new Firefox 3.0 and it is indeed very fast. I still need to get used to the changes but this is nothing new when you use new software.

What I am more excited is that the website which has been for a long time my homepage, BahaiPrayers.org, has been redesigned in a most beautiful — and standard-compliant — way. It is truly a joy to look at, not just to read it, and I highly recommend it to anyone whose eyes, or soul, are sorely desperate for spiritual beauty!

P.S. I just installed a new WordPress theme as well. Let’s see if this will motivate me to blog more.