Rachel Murray

A List Apart conducted an extensive survey of web professionals.  I was disappointed to see the gender disparities, let alone the ethnic ones, but I guess it’s not too much of a surprise. It’s nice to know that my new job title has added another woman to the small amount of female “web directors”.

Roar

Get the A List Apart survey… be warned, it’s huge. I only skimmed it.

I swear, sometimes I feel like a cavewoman seeing fire for the first time, or a peasant in the Middle Ages watching a “miracle”. Google Analytics announced some major enhancements to their (hello, FREE) tool that will make my job so much easier. Lots of people, of course, are blogging about this, but these are one of my favorite folks:

http://www.conversationmarketing.com/2007/10/new_google_analytics_announced.htm 

Idealware is an awesome group, so of course, I turned to them in my hour of need. They provided me with good advice, though honestly, I’m still searching for people to talk to. The companies that use the product just seem so teeny tiny. Hmmm.

http://www.idealware.org/blog/2007/10/ask-idealware-finding-current-users-of.html 

Google Maps is awesome. Groundbreaking. We all know it. But, as a professional pedestrian, one thing that always made me sad was no walking directions. Now some people might ask, Rachel, why the heck would you need walking directions? And I shall retort, have you seen the crazy, random, one-way, dead-end-y, zig-zaggy streets of Boston, Cambridge and Somerville? There is almost always a more efficient way to walk to a place than to drive it. So, driving directions are usually pointless for me. But lo! Ask.com has answered my prayers. Isn’t that great? You can get walking directions to your heart’s content. Now, once we mash that up with public transportation (mbta.com is close, oh so close), I’ll be all set, knowing the most efficient way to get from point a to point b and back again without guesswork.

The Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library is a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources. All components in the YUI Library have been released as open source under a BSD license and are free for all uses.

Sweet, right? Yay Yahoo!

The other reason I’ve been so busy these past few weeks is I’ve been working on WordPressing the Restless Virgins website. It just went live last night. Yeah, sure, it’s been up for a while and hopefully you wouldn’t notice too big a difference between the old site and the new one if you’ve been before. Yesterday it was a bunch of static html pages that could only be edited by someone not terrified to look at code. Bad. Now it’s in a very pretty admin-friendly tool called WordPress, which is what’s running this website, too. Good.

I originally thought Drupal was the answer to everything, but after thinking about it some more, if you’re looking to build a fairly straightforward website, brochure-like with some basic archiving functionality, I’d go with WordPress. Here’s why:

1. There’s some good support for the basics. I was easily able to add a basic calendar function for their events and you can mess with categories to get them pretty much to do what you want.

2. I prefer their admin UI for editors. It’s really pleasing to the eye and their wysiwyg editor is clean, simple and functional. It’s also very AJAX-y, which I’m a sucker for.

3. Like Drupal, it’s super easy to install with one-click install, and there are more out-of-the-box features that come with that install than Drupal does (like blog and wysiwyg editor).

4. Plugins (equivalent to Drupal’s modules) and themes are as easy to add as in Drupal, just a quick upload to the right folder and activate through the UI.

5. It looks like there are lots more templates to choose from and I think designers built a lot of them, as they’re much slicker-looking than the Drupal themes.

That said, I do love Drupal and will use that as the platform of choice at my day job because of its incredible extensibility (and a host of other reasons that may be written in a post in the very near future).

Holy crap. Seriously, wow. Be ready to get your mind blown over the digital image resizer.

Well, more news in the Google/Jot world. As I continue to chomp at the bit in anticipation of Jot‘s new arrival, it’s become very clear that it will become a part of a suite of tools along with Google Apps, which I’ve been playing with for the past month or so. Then I stumbled on this article, Jot Joining the Google Apps revolution and voila. Suspicions confirmed.

The article mentions that Google Apps is doing well in the small business realm, and I would argue that it’s right up a nonprofit’s alley, too. Because of such fair pricing (not to mention all the grants) and easy-to-use tools, it allows nonprofits (who have to spend less money on infrastructure because donors want their money spent on program) a way to practically leapfrog technology. The reference to “cloud computing” the article makes seems to be the next logical step in computer usage, and it’s nice to see nonprofits able to take advantage of this. Combine what Google offers with Jot, Salesforce and Drupal and we’re practically living on easy street. Of course there’s still work to be done, but the work can be more about strategizing how to deliver the program online to the widest (relevant) audience.

I’m really excited about the possibilities, but I promise to never call this web 3.0.

Yay! It’s about time we’re able to embed google maps on webpages. Storefronts, have at it! Here’s where I live-ish:

View Larger Map

Thank you SearchEngineLand for the tip!

Thank you Berkman Center for pointing me to a most excellent collection of archival photos from the Smithsonian brought to us by the good folks at public.resource.org. What a great resource for nonprofits!