Tag Archives: web development

Satchmo, Django and all that jazz

One reason The Nerdery is home to a growing number of user groups is that hosting lets our ever-curious programmers stay after school to learn from other top minds in the tech community. For example, if we felt we needed a better grip on the Internet, we’d invite its inventor in for a PowerPoint chat – but we kind of get it.

So, at last Thursday’s monthly meeting of Minnesota Python developers, The Nerdery welcomed Satchmo founder and lead developer Chris Moffitt to discuss his creation. The seeds of Satchmo were planted three years ago when Moffitt emailed his Django user group to find others interested in helping him create what would become his Django shopping cart. Now billed as “the webshop for perfectionists with deadlines,” Satchmo is an alternative to numerous PHP-based open source ecommerce solutions. Satchmo’s Django-based framework lets Python and Django developers create highly customized online shops.

Here are several ecommerce sites using Satchmo and the slides from Chris Moffitt’s presentation:

The Nerdery’s Robert Speer came away from Moffitt’s presentation with this list of things he likes about Satchmo:

• It’s just a shopping cart, and does not try to be everything to everybody
• Plays nice with and uses other Django plugins (blogs, CMS’s, image manipulation, authentication…)
• Multi-tenancy; one shopping cart can service many sites
• Internationalization
• Tax/vat support
• Multiple shipping options
• Multiple payment gateways shipped with app
• Default templates, written to be easily extended
• Uses jQuery
• Built for easy customization

Also likable: Minnesota’s Python user group, PyMNtos, meets on the second Thursday of each month at The Nerdery. As the original Satchmo himself once said: “What a wonderful world.”

Get your Dojo working

Tonight’s Twin Cities Web Design user group meeting here at The Nerdery features Dojo guru Chris Barber of CB1, Inc. Chris will do a show-and-tell on how he uses the Dojo JavaScript toolkit to build rich apps. He’ll cover: manipulating the DOM; event handling; cross-browser quirks; widgets; and the build system.

What: Dojo – JavaScript’s Swiss Army Knife

When: Wednesday, July 15, 6-8 p.m.

Where: The Nerdery

We’re pleased to host this user group, and all the more pleased when we know who’s coming (so we can order enough pizza), so please leave a comment on the TC Web Design website if you’re Nerdery bound (resident nerds, same goes if you’re staying).

Next Python group meeting: Better than Snakes on a Plane?

If it’s the second Thursday of the month at The Nerdery, it’s Python user group time for web developers into the open source and dynamic object-oriented programming language.

This just in from PyMNtos organizer John Shimek:

“Scheduled to talk is: Richard on Paste and Pylons; Curt Thompson on Troppo; and Matt Westerburg on Something*

*My bad handwriting says Camile but I can’t figure out what that is. And on this topic, Matt told me that he will be using screenshots of code and switching to a text editor/interpreter for the code samples. Now we should be able to understand his complicated code:)”

When: Thursday, July 9 at 7 p.m.

Where: Here

What others are saying about Minnesota’s Python user group:

“Can I be in that?” – Samuel L. Jackson

jQuery – any questions?

Here’s everything you ever wanted to know about jQuery but were afraid to visit The Nerdery in order to ask. Or maybe you were busy, or just nowhere near the neighborhood. Regardless, here’s what you missed if you missed Marc Grabanski’s jQuery Essentials talk at the Twin Cities Web Design user group gathering.

Watch it here:

jQuery Talk at the Nerdery from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

Slides are here:

Overnight Website Challenge gives people ‘faith & hope that there’s still good in society’

Before:

When Todd Hinz, a board member of Friends of Fort Snelling, first heard about the Overnight Website Challenge he immediately thought about what a golden opportunity this could be for his organization.

“Offers like this don’t come along every day, so I knew we had to hop on it as soon as I read about the contest in MinnPost.org,” Hinz said. So even though there was a little trepidation on the Friends’ part, because Hinz was so new to the board, they still jumped into the Challenge headfirst.

Hinz said he thought their chances for being selected as one of the twelve nonprofits who get a website in 24 hours was slim to none. “We figured there would be a lot of great organizations with wonderful causes applying, but our attitude was ‘what do we have to lose?’”

“The original site was a great effort by one of our volunteers and it helped immeasurably to get a presence on the web,” he said. But the original site lacked a cohesive design and many features people expect to find on modern websites, RSS feeds, online registration, and an activities list.

So with those needs in mind, Hinz and the Friends of Fort Snelling were hooked up with Team Inetium on the day of the webchallenge who created a new website for the Friends.

After:

The entire organization is very proud of and excited by the new site, Hinz said, and he’s been pleasantly surprised by Team Inetium’s dedication.

“Even after the contest was over, our team went above and beyond the call of duty to finish details on the site and train us on how to use it,” he said. “They also built us a back-end database to keep track of membership details and donations.”

Hinz chalks up the whole experience as a success. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat. It was a blast! The contest is a unique way to build a website and have a great time doing it.

“Seriously, what a cool way to not only help nonprofits in need, but give web designers the opportunity to give back to the community,” Hinz said. “This whole project gives a lot of people faith and hope that there is still good in society.”

YEA Corps gets pie in the sky from Overnight Website Challenge

“My team finished in 23:30 minutes — under budget,” Mary Helen Franze, the Founder and Executive Director of YEA Corps, said. “They totally nailed it. I got pie in the sky. There was not one thing I didn’t get.”

Franze and her organization, YEA Corps was one of the twelve lucky Minnesota nonprofits who won a new website during this year’s Overnight Website Challenge. On the morning of February 28th, 2009 Franze was teamed up with The Mighty Polymorphin Power Rangers: Extra Awesome to build the YEA Corps website from scratch.

There was nothing to redesign, no content to plan around, YEA Corps was starting fresh. In fact, it was only a matter of months since the nonprofit started. “Building a nonprofit from scratch at the speed of light in three months is really quite amazing,” Franze said.

Franze chalks it up to cosmic synergy

Finally starting the nonprofit after years of research, electing a board, and getting chosen for the web challenge, all synergy. “The credibility of the judges and the professionalism of the people at Sierra Bravo really was, to me, the world saying, ‘yes, this is it.’”

With a background in business and marketing, Franze fully understood the importance a good website would have in her brand-new nonprofit. She also knew that quality might come at a high price.

“A first impression is a lasting impression,” Franze said. “Getting a professional website free just brought me to my knees.”

Franze described her experience at the web challenge as both trying and fun. “I have honestly never had so much information come into my head in a twenty-four hour period,” she said. “I can’t say enough about these people I worked with. Most of the guys on my team were Sierra Bravo people, and they kept telling me that this doesn’t end today. ‘We’re going to help you.’ I might be the webmaster, but they’re going to be my help desk.”

David Simmer, one of the non-Sierra Bravo volunteers on Franze’s team, designed card and letterhead for YEA Corps. “He did all this design work pro-bono,” she said. “We’re so set now, I don’t even know what we’re going to do.”

What they’re going to do is empower youth to implement their ideas through community connections for job preparation by offering youth an entrepreneurial experience through projects they conceive and image providing framework, material, and training to execute youth-generated enterprises.

Franze who is excited to get the ball rolling with her new website and nonprofit is just as excited by her whole Overnight Web Challenge experience.

“I can’t say enough about the fact that Sierra Bravo has identified a need in the community that most people don’t recognize,” she said. “Most nonprofits are just working hard to get their pennies in, they don’t think about the ROI of a website because they can’t. That you [Sierra Bravo] have given this gift of a website, is beyond the call of duty of any tech company. It’s going to create more movements than you know and trickle down to the good of society.”

“Plus,” she said, “You were fun every step of the way and so professional.”

HashTweeps beta & why working with nerds is the best thing ever

What follows is an actual, factual true story and not made-up marketing schmaltz. I know that it’s true because it happened to me. This story will illustrate to you why working with nerds is roughly 97.6% cooler than working with any other kind of people.

After the smoke began to clear from the Overnight Website Challenge, Ali Karbassi and I were having a twitter-conversation about how we should totally make a list of all the people who tweeted about the event. Because, well, they are obviously the smartest, most interesting people on Twitter and we wanted to keep up with them.

Ali had the great idea about setting up a Google form and having people add their information.

But then Tom O’Neil (who works at The Nerdery as VP of Development) blew that great idea right out of the water. What he came up with was HashTweeps, which is in beta — but you can totally use it already. Tom, with design help from our own Karsten Lundquist (who should get props for doing this on his day off, and a day after the webchallenge), whipped this out in less than a day. It makes my head spin.

What HashTweeps does is let you search by hashtag and find all the people who were twittering using that term. HOW COOL IS THAT?

Sorry, I got a little carried away there. It’s just that my mind is still a little blown. Yesterday there was no solution to the problem (at least no solution that I knew of) and today there’s an awesome web app that let’s you quickly and easily see who is talking about you (or what you care about, or what you don’t care about). No more combing through pages and pages of Twitter search results with just the click of the search button, I can see all 215 people who tweeted about the webchallenge.

Besides making the branding folks and PR people weep with joy, HashTweeps really, fully illustrated why working with nerds is the best thing ever. With a few hours of programming, Tom made possible something I didn’t even consider possible.

And while I know, on at least a conceptual level, this is what we do at The Nerdery — making the designs and ideas of marketing and advertising agencies come to life on the web — experiencing it first hand is totally mind-blowing.

How they’re judged

DSC_3778, originally uploaded by acgedde.

We had a comment earlier that asked about how the teams were judged and what happens afterward.

First, we have four celebrity judges:
Christine Durand, Director of Communications for the MN Council of Nonprofits
Dan Grigsby, Founder of multiple startups and tech community organizer
Robert Stephens, Found of The Geek Squad
Chris Wiggins, Creative Director of Fallon

In the morning each judge will spend 10 minutes with each team finding out what challenges they faced over the course of the night, what their plans were, and evaluating the new site. After that each team gives a five-minute presentation about the features and functionality of their new site.

Each site is team is judged on:
Website design aesthetic, look-and-feel, and functionality (50 points)
Client satisfaction (25 points)
Commitment of ongoing support (25 points)
Presentation (10 points)

The team with the highest average score wins.

Of course, we think everyone involved is already a winner. Twelve nonprofits are getting badass new websites and the nerds get to do a really good deed for the day. But yes there are most certainly bragging rights on the line.

‘This is the only way we’d get this quality of work done to our website’

Working Smarter Now from The Nerdery on Vimeo.

You’ll be singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” after watching this short clip from the nonprofits who benefited during the 2008 Challenge. Here they talk about how much their new website has changed the way they work and generally made things a kabillion times better.

Web Makeovers Powered by Nerds, a presentation from New Times – New Tech

Today, our president, Luke Bucklin and User Experience Manager, Mike Johnson along with Molly Kennedy Lageson of Store to Door presented at the Minnesota Council of Nonprofits’ New Times – New Tech conference.

The presentation, which you can watch above, is about empowering nonprofits to take control of their website by treating it like an employee. We’ve found that oftentimes organizations treat their website like a copy machine, a piece of technology, but really its your hardest-working underachiever.

During the event our presenters took attendees through the Website Employee Review form (which you can download as a PDF) and talked about how you don’t have to be super tech savvy to get the most from your website.

Finally, here are links to a few of the sites/services mentioned in the presentation:
Facebook
Twitter
Google Analytics
Google Alerts
Crazy Egg
Blogger
WordPress
Typepad

Also, further reading:
Advergirl’s Rethinking Web strategy for nonprofits: The New Best Practices (part 1, part 2, and part 3)