Technology priorities, cool tool of the month, and DNS-related web site problems
By Gillian Kerr, RealWorld Systems
The information in this article
is current as of November 7, 2001.
Name change!
We have changed our name from Good Enough Information Systems to RealWorld
Systems. (All the other high tech companies change their names constantly,
so we thought we would too.) Our new site (www.realworldsystems.net)
will focus on consulting services, because many of the free web based services
that goodenough.ca describes have closed down or started charging subscription
fees. We will archive the goodenough.ca site, and probably won’t add
services in the future. However, we will continue to cover interesting approaches
and services in this column. See Tech Soup at www.techsoup.org
for up to date information on web services for nonprofit organizations.
RealWorld Systems works with government and nonprofits in the U.S. and Canada.
We are developing several web sites for nonprofits using an open source program
called Zope Content Management Framework; we’re helping to make U.S.
government technology accessible to people with disabilities; and we’re
carrying out evaluations of technology programs for the Canadian federal government.
Technology priorities for the voluntary sector
As I described in last month’s column, we are carrying out a study of
nonprofit technology needs for the Voluntary
Sector Initiative’s
Information Management/Information Technology Joint Table. Based on 60
interviews across the country and a literature review of nonprofit needs,
we have developed a list of seventeen technology programs that nonprofits
have requested. They are split into the following categories:
- A voice for the voluntary sector: Engagement in public policy.
- Information management: Sharing and finding knowledge
- Fundraising and resource development: Mobilizing the community and responding
to funders
- Collaboration: Connecting with colleagues and community members
- Volunteers and Staff: Recruitment, training and development
- Hardware, software and connectivity: Paying for the infrastructure
We would love to have your input on which options would be the most useful
to you. Please fill out the web survey at www.technologydiscussion.org,
and you will be among the first to hear about the Voluntary Sector Initiative’s
funding program. The results of the survey will also be distributed to other
funders in government and the voluntary sector.
Cool Tools of the Month – Saving Word documents into real HTML
These free tools are wonderful for agencies that have Microsoft Word and want
to share documents on the web or with people who don’t have access to Word.
When you are sending documents to agencies or community members, you should
use formats that are accessible to everyone. The most accessible formats are
plain text and simple HTML. It is much better to send an attached HTML file
than a Word document unless you know that everyone else has Word or a free Word
viewer (available
here but it’s a drag to install).
As you probably know, you can save Word 2000 documents into Microsoft’s
version of HTML, which is filled with funny codes that are difficult to read
for some browsers. These free services save Word into real usable HTML.
Textism’s Word
HTML Cleaner "strips the gunk from MSWord HTML". You can then
post the pages onto a web site or send them as attached files. (Cut and past
the HTML into a text file first, using Notepad, and give the file a name with
an .html extension.)
GoHTM converts RTF or Word documents into
HTML files that you can post directly onto a web site. It adds a little logo
that tells people about its service, but the logo is a fair price for the service
and can even be removed.
Switching web site providers in a hurry
A major philanthropy web site recently went down for over two weeks because
their web provider went bankrupt. Exodus, a highly respected web site host,
stopped providing services with no warning, leaving Philanthropy
Online high and dry. I’ve heard of several other large sites in the
private and voluntary sectors being taken off-line due to various web host problems.
For example, a sudden surge in web site visitors caused by a special event,
a public promotion or a major news story can take down an entire web site. One
of our own web sites, along with our email service, disappeared for two days
because of mysterious and intermittent DNS resolution issues.
For organizations that depend on email and web sites, the loss of online service
is embarrassing and costly. And to make things worse, technical support people
for the various services generally blame each other – when you can reach
them.
We have begun using a DNS Management Service that will (hopefully) protect us
from many of these problems in the future. We’re using UltraDNS;
EasyDNS is another similar provider. UltraDNS
enables us to point our domain name to anywhere in the web, and to change it
as often as we wish. We can now switch the location of one of our web sites
within an hour or two rather than the three days that is common with most web
site changes. That means that if we’re having trouble with a web host we
can change to another within an hour or two; it means that if we had a surge
of web site traffic we could move quickly to another server, or forward our
email to another provider. The cost for one site starts at $5/month U.S. It’s
the kind of service that you don’t think you need until you need it. Check
it out.
One bit of warning – it’s complicated at first, so don’t wait
until the last moment before setting it up. It takes a few days to transfer
over to UltraDNS at the beginning, and you will probably get at least one
thing wrong. And a tip – when you’re in a hurry to switch domains,
choose a TTL (Time to Live) of 15 minutes (900 seconds) rather than UltraDNS’s
default of 24 hours (86,400 seconds). When the domain name has been switched
successfully, change the TTL back to 24 hours to save money. You’ll figure
out what I mean when you set it up. If not, ask their Technical Support people.
************
Gillian Kerr, Ph.D., C.Psych.
President, RealWorld Systems
gkerr at realworldsystems.net
Read my weblog at http://blog.realworldsystems.net
