CampaignFoundations.com

I offer this here because while users of our content management systems are able to post their content without having to worry about the technology which makes the web work, knowing a little about that technology gives you considerable power to enhance your content, making it accessible to the reader. What follows includes a bit about how I have advised the Green Party of the United States to handle their Platform revision process, and includes the slides prepared for a presentation offered today on basic html skills.

Friday evening I flew up here to Pittsburg Pennsylvania to attend the state Party's state meeting. This is my first visit to the nation's largest inland port on the Mississippi basin since the 1995 meeting of the Independent Progressive Politics Network (whose site CampaignFoundations.com now proudly hosts).

http://blackagendareport.com/?q=content/black-agenda-report-publishing-fewer-articles-week-due-holidays-oh-and-were-growing

Black Agenda Report is having problems, but they're good problems to have, and we are solving them. Some weeks ago we realized that our hosting arrangement had for almost two years imposed an artificial cap on our readership. Any time more than seventy or eighty people were on our site at once, it ground to a halt. When at peak hours traffic ninety, a hundred or more at a time accessed it, the site was inaccessible. We're writers and journalists, not tech gurus, so we asked for help.

With the assistance of the good people at Campaign Foundations, www.campaignfoundations.com, we are now implementing a more sophisticated and scalable architecture. When demand for our site rises, we are now able to scale up additional web servers on demand and balance the load between them.

His administration may have displaced US troops in Iraq with taxpayer paid mercenaries, escalated the war in Afghanistan, distributed 17+ trillion dollars in corporate welfare to the banksters out of the public purse and sold out 'hope and change' voters seeking affordable access to health care to pad the profits of the insurance industry which denies us the health care recommended by our doctors.

But today the Obama administration made one intelligent choice we think Greens can support. They moved whitehouse.gov to an open source application licensed under the Gnu Public License. In fact the administration's primary public face is now hosted on the same open source content management platform which is used to serve the campaign websites of Green candidates hosted by CampaignFoundations.com. For the details, see today's AP article on the subject.

Our core skill set at CampaignFoundations.com is about protecting the integrity of your data. We gladly consider handling in house database work and application development and integration projects, tasks which lean on our provision of systems and database administration and application development skills.

We leave content creation to the candidates we serve, the ones on the front lines, listening to the voters and building collaboration for Green-Justice changes in public policy.

There is something else we leave to others as well.

On Thursday, July 23rd, 2009, I presented a workshop at the Annual National Meeting of the National Committee of the Green Party of the United States. . . . The workshop, entitled: "How Information Services Can Serve Your Campaign" was attended by Greens from a half dozen states and was well received. No video or audio recording was made of the event. But attached to this post is the slide presentation I used in the presentation. Hope you find it useful. If you'd like to learn more about what CampaignFoundations.com can do for your next campaign, please do not hesitate to give me a call.

Although the open source movement has been active for more than a decade, it is only in recent months that such a copyright license actually has received the imprimatur of enforceability -- from an unlikely court (the Federal Circuit) construing a perhaps unlikely license (the Java Model Railroad Interface for model train software). Open source licensing, of course, is the innovative (if controversial) tool that makes source code available to the general public on conditions (of varying severity) to guarantee continued public access to works derived from the original. Such licenses can require licensees to disclose source code and distribute derivative works royalty-free. Well-known open source licenses include the Creative Commons License, Apache License and Sun Community Source License. Perhaps best-known is the General Public License, now in its third version, which governs Linux, MySQL, and other major software products. It is perhaps also the most feared for its requirement that any source code compiled with any GPL-licensed source code be publicly disclosed upon distribution -- often referred to as "infection."

Today, CampaignFoundations.com announced the release, under the Gnu Public License, of its latest contribution to the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network, making CMS::JoomlaToDrupal available for public download.

http://search.cpan.org/~hesco/CMS-JoomlaToDrupal-0.04/lib/CMS/JoomlaToDrupal.pm

Over the past few months, I have heard from a growing list of folks who are operating existing websites, hosting an archive of legacy material and bumping up against the limits of their starter CMS. Joomla has proven a popular Content Management System for startup websites on a budget. Here at CampaignFoundations.com, we host our clients' sites on another popular CMS, drupal. These folks who have contacted us do so having made the choice to migrate their existing sites to drupal to take advantage of its more sophisticated access control system and the hundreds of modules and themes that are available to extend and customize the system.

Problem has been, what do you do with the legacy content?

The old school way has been manually copy the stories from the old site, into the new site, one story or comment at a time. This is a most tedius process, made all the worse by the size of the legacy archives.

Bruce Dixon of http://BlackAgendaReport.com/ approached us at the end of December, contemplating such a move; and contracted with CampaignFoundations.com in hopes of finding an easier way. The result is CMS::JoomlaToDrupal, a new perl module released this morning to CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network.

Today, a first release candidate for LedgerSMB-API was posted to the Comprehensive Perl Archive Network. Early this coming week, it is expected to be also released on SourceForge. This new module is intended to support the work of developers who seek to integrate online commerce applications with a full featured accounting system.

CampaignFoundations.com founding partner Hugh Esco has been one of the two principal developers working to make LedgerSMB::API available to integrators. "Integrating our donor forms and the ecommerce applications used by our client campaigns for campaign merchandising has long been on our to-do list," said Esco, who has previously shared his Perl coding skills with the public under open source licensing. LedgerSMB::API represents his fifth contribution to the open source CPAN library. Each of his contributions were developed to serve the needs of Green Parties and their campaigns, but offer benefits to far broader audiences. "This past year we finally added to our supporters.cgi application (which provides donor forms) the ability to register an Instant Payment Notification. The obvious next step is to post those donations straight to the campaign books, relieving overworked volunteer campaign treasurers of those bookkeeping duties."

In his previous contributions to CPAN Esco has released under the Gnu Public License, the following modules:

* Test::MonitoSites written under contract to the Green Party of Canada.

* GD::Graph::Thermometer written to be integrated with supporters.cgi for the McKinney 2006 Congressional Campaign Debt Retirement effort, prior to the launch of her bid for the 2008 Green Party Presidential Nomination.

* Business::CCProcessor to provide for safely handing off a donor transaction to a secure server, prior to the collection of confidential financial data.

* Config::Simple::Extended to add additional features to a popular application configuration module. So far this module offers two additional features over Config::Simple which have become indispensible to custom development being done by CampaignFoundations, including the ability to choose a configuration based on the incoming url, and the ability to inherit a configuration, overwriting job configurations on top of client and server wide configurations.

"Long range, we hope that CampaignFoundations.com can also extend our accounting system on the other side to integrate directly with FECFile, to provide for the seemless production of Federal Campaign Finance Reports," said Esco. "We also want to create new custom reports to make disclosure compliance with state and local campaign finance laws less tedious for the campaigns we support. We're working to build a toolkit to support often underfunded Green candidates and their campaigns."

I got a call from a Green who said that following complete scans (she used WinClamAV, which has been highly recommended to me) and some AdAware knockoff, that she had been able to recover use of her machine and restore her desktop, only to find that her 'E' and 'S' keys now seem disabled. This was my advice to her about how to diagnose the issue, determine if she needed a registry cleaner or a new keyboard. I wrote:

I'm urging you download and keep handy a copy of Knoppix (http://knoppix.net/get.php). Its a rescue / diagnostics / desktop work environment Live Boot CD.

As with other live boot CDs, Knoppix will provide you with a working desktop including access to your hard drive and mature office suites and internet and other tools suitable for both office work and diagnostic and development work. It will auto configure itself to your hardware. It boots up in a couple of minutes.