civiCRM Experiments

For another non-profit, I’ve started to play with a “constituent relationship manager” package, the FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) civiCRM. So far it looks interesting. The standalone version is tied to OpenID, and I couldn’t make it work in the local sandbox, but the version embedded in Joomla seems to work. They say the Drupal version is better integrated. Stay tuned for a more thorough look.
jay

knightsia.org hacked, now fixed

ARRRGH, somehow hackers got into knightsia.org and planted some malware on 14 Aug. Google found it in a routine crawl, and informed me. The problems were fixed in an hour or so after notification, but it's taken almost two weeks to get off the bad guys list. The suspected attack came in via a slightly downrev version of WordPress or SMF. I'll be more vigilent. My apologies if you were affected by this brief problem.
UPDATE: trying blogger in parallel for a while. Both will be kept in sync til I pick one.

Interesting Historic/Current Map Mashup

Wired.com posted a note about Hypercities, an ambitious project at UCLA funded by a Macarthur grant. Hypercities has digitized and scaled a large number of historic and current maps of several cities around the world. Maps can be overlayed in multiple layers on Google Earth, allowing the user to make their own combinations of data. I want to learn more and see how the SIA might be more engaged in the project.
http://hypercities.com/

jay

SIANS Web Site

Nope, not THAT SIA, but Survey of Industrial Archeology in Nova Scotia, an ambitious, community driven site that seeks to document the industrial heritage of the Province of Nova Scotia. I'm trying to learn more about it, but a quick visit looks to be very interesting. I really like the community aspects of it, but am curious about workflow and quality assurance. Cloudy vision about this sort of thing for the SIA...

Hmmm,

jay

2009 NTHP 11 Most Endangered Historic Sites

In April, the National Trust for Historic for Historic Preservation issued its annual list of the Eleven Most Endangered Historic Sites. The SIA had previously been asked to support two of these sites, the Memorial Bridge btw Portsmouth, NH and Kittery, ME, and the Ames Shovel Shops in North Easton, MA, which we did through the Historic Preservation Committee reviewing the requests and having our President, Mary Habstritt, draft a letter in support. The process, created in 2007, allows a timely, considered response in which the SIA can review and endorse significant industrial heritage preservation activities. I'm pleased that these sites made the list, though that's a dubious honor, as they are still very much in danger, and worthy of continuing efforts to preserve them. I'm also happy that the SIA was able to respond to the requests of the organizations supporting the preservation of these sites in a timely way, but with careful review and internal comment. Can't win 'em all, but this is an important role for the SIA.

Excavations at Heinlenville (San Jose)

Got a chance to stop by an on-going dig at Heinlenville (the third?) San Jose Chinatown, that also fostered the growth of Japantown. This is the second year of work on the site, which was preserved by the City turning the site into the main vehicle garage etc and paving over all the cool stuff, saving it for work in the last two years. This was a destination at SIA2008, though the 2008 dig completed a few weeks before we came to see it. COOL!

Pix and links to follow...

SIA eNews and Social Networking

We're about four months into the experiment with eNews for the SIA, and have gotten a good response.  Signup off the SIA home page.

In response to member suggestions, I've gone ahead and set up SIA groups on facebook and linkedin. These are experimental, but it's free, so what the heck.

I'm even tweeting as jaym3

Dunno the long term future of these efforts, but I hope that they enable us to reach out to new members and friends.

jay