Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology

My Browser Stats

On 06 Mar, 2011 By mpm With 2 Comments

I was looking at my Google Analytics report for this blog, and came across an interesting thing. The browser share of those visiting my site, and the North America browser share from Statcounter. Here are my stats:

Here are the stats from Statcounter:

It's a bit hard to see, but my stats have IE as third, where as the Statcounter stats have IE as out front, by a fair bit. Also, my stats have Chrome in 2nd place, and they have Chrome in 3rd, even with Safari, and a fair bit below Firefox. This falls into the category of "things that make you go hmmmmm..." Although in some ways, it makes sense, given that my audience is much more tech-savvy than the audiences of most websites. (For instance, my personal site, that gets much less traffic, and is likely a less techy crowd, has stats much more similar to Statcounter than this blog.) So, anyway, way to go readers, making Firefox first! And for those 37 of you who visited this year using IE6, shame on you. Be nice to web developers and ditch IE 6, please?

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly RFPs

On 03 Mar, 2011 By mpm With 2 Comments

In my time working on web development for nonprofit organizations, I've seen more RFPs than I can even begin to count. I've even written a few. And, especially since I've primarily been someone in the role of having to respond to an RFP, I've gotten pretty good at spotting RFPs that I feel don't serve either the organization, or the developers well. Here is, in my estimation, the good, bad, and ugly in the realm of RFPs. I'll start with the bad.

Open Source vs. Proprietary: Overview

On 28 Feb, 2011 By mpm With 1 Comments

Since I wrote my post on "Open Source vs. Proprietary" last week, and especially after Thomas Taylor's very apt comment that the battle is not over in many corners, I decided that, well, what the heck, it was a good time to write a series about open source software options, and their comparisons to proprietary, in 2011, more than 12 years after this whole thing started.

Changes ...

On 27 Feb, 2011 By mpm With 1 Comments

"Nothing endures but change" - Heraclitus Sometimes, change happens when we're not looking for it, or we don't really want it. Sometimes changes that we don't want lead us to places that make more sense for us. This is one of those times. I've been struggling with health issues (life-altering, but not life-threatening, thankfully) for almost 6 months. They have led me to make a significant change in my work life.

Technology and the Environment

On 23 Feb, 2011 By mpm With 4 Comments

This is an issue I've been struggling with for a long time. I'm an unrepentant, unabashed technophile. OK, well, not so unrepentant or unabashed since I'm writing this post on the varied factors around technology and the environment, and have been thinking about this issue for myself for a long time.

Why Zen?

On 22 Feb, 2011 By mpm With 1 Comments

"Only the present moment is real and available to us. The peace we desire is not in some distant future, but it is something we can realize in the present moment." --Thich Nhat Hahn

I have been thinking about why I decided to call this blog "Zen and the Art of Nonprofit Technology" recently.

LibreOffice vs. OpenOffice.org

On 21 Feb, 2011 By mpm With 1 Comments

I hope that everyone reading this blog has heard of OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org is a free and open source cross-platform office suite, which can read and write MS Office .doc, .xls, and .ppt files. It actually has more to it than that, there is a drawing program, a database, a math equation editor and more.

Open Source vs. Proprietary. Who won?

On 19 Feb, 2011 By mpm With 4 Comments

This epic battle between Open Source software (or Free software) and proprietary software is coming to a close. Some might argue that FOSS won the battle. Others would argue that proprietary software won. I'm going to argue that both won, and both lost. The Desktop About 10 years ago, the very big FOSS vs. Proprietary battle was between Linux and Microsoft. The "year of the Linux desktop", where Linux becomes a dominant force in the desktop computing world, was predicted, but never came. It never will come. Er, well.

How to deal with technology change

On 18 Feb, 2011 By mpm With 2 Comments

I saw a call for a ColdFusion developer on an email list I'm on, and I couldn't help but think about technology choice and change, particularly in the website world, and how nonprofits deal with technology change (or, don't deal with it.) ColdFusion has been around for 15 years (more than a century in Internet time), and although it has improved and developed, technologically, it has been surpassed by its successors (including PHP, Java, Python, RubyonRails, and even .NET.) But this article isn't about CF, it's about technology change. Tec

Reader solicitation

On 17 Feb, 2011 By mpm With 3 Comments

As you can tell, I've been writing more lately, and I plan, for the time being at least, to really step up my blogging game. I've got a list of posts of my own I want to write, but I realized that some long-time readers of this blog might want me to write about some specific things that fit under my basic purview. Research you've been too busy to do, something you want my unique opinion on, something you're curious about. So, I'm soliciting ideas.