Node: Title,Node: Created Time,Node: Body,Link: Visit the website (field_website)
"Anne Mitchell's Blog","07/19/2010 - 15:59","Visit the website: http://annemitchell.ca/ Anne Mitchell was the Executive Director at CIELAP until June 2009. She's now retired and doing interesting freelance work. She's also a Quaker friend and has been generous with her time and stuff to me and many others for as long as I've known her  so I volunteered to set her up with a simple blog using Drupal. Here's what Drupal does out of the box with hardly any work on my part. ","http://annemitchell.ca/"
"Orgwise.ca: An Organizational Self-Assessment Site","02/23/2010 - 18:04","Visit the website: http://www.orgwise.ca/ Orgwise is a project of OCASI  a coalition of agencies serving immigrants in Ontario. The site enables settlement organizations to self-assess themselves in terms of operations   human resources  governance and strategic leadership  and community engagement by leading them through a list of questions and presenting them an evaluation upon completion. The project was  a challenge of custom module programming - some created from scratch  some based on existing Drupal modules - with lots of  jquery work to make a nice user interface. The site also had to be in both English and French  and provides some nice charts  graphs and tables. ","http://www.orgwise.ca/"
"Sierra Club of Canada","02/23/2010 - 17:49","Visit the website: http://www.sierraclub.ca/ The  Sierra Club Canada is one of North America’s oldest and most established environmental organizations. With thousands of members and supporters  they have been safeguarding the environment and working towards a sustainable Canada for our future and the present. The national office was established in Ottawa in 1989. As a member-based organization  they were using Raiser's Edge (a desktop-based CRM) to track contributions  membership  event participation  and other details.  In 2008  they decided to convert to CiviCRM for these functions  and at the same time convert their ActionApps based site to Drupal. I helped them with both conversions  and the new site was launched in December 2009. You can read my blog about some advanced techniques I used in the CiviCRM migration. ","http://www.sierraclub.ca/"
"Alpha Alternative School Bazaar","11/20/2009 - 12:25","Visit the website: http://alphabazaar.ca/ The ALPHA Bazaar is the work of the children  staff and parents of ALPHA  a small  alternative Toronto public school that was established in 1971. The school is located on the corner of Brant and Adelaide Streets. ALPHA’s unique program and philosophy attract children from across the city of Toronto. Alpha is a very parent involved school  so setting up this little website was one of my contributions to the Bazaar over the past few years. It's a good example of a simple  out-of-the-box Drupal site  with very minimal design work  using the default Garland theme. ","http://alphabazaar.ca/"
"Fair Vote Canada: CiviCRM Implementation and Support","07/24/2009 - 14:11","Visit the website: http://www.fairvote.ca/ Fair Vote Canada is a small NGO  has been around for about 7 years  and is a public interest lobby group for proportional representation-type voting systems in Canada. If you care about democracy  then they're worth supporting.  In April 2008 I helped Fair Vote Canada with a re-implementation of CiviCRM to manage their donations  membership and communication with their constituents. See this case study for a detailed look at that process. During summer/fall 2008  I helped migrate their mail to google apps  updated their Drupal install  cleaned up their disks  and eventually switched the site over to my server during the October federal election. Also during this time  I provided ongoing CiviCRM support as they extended their use of CiviCRM and continue to work out the details of how to use it. In spring/summer 2009  I migrated them back to my server when their existing host quit  upgraded the site to Drupal 6 and CiviCRM 2.2  and implemented a new theme. ","http://www.fairvote.ca/"
"The Tyee: A Major Alternative News Site","07/16/2009 - 04:00","Visit the website: http://thetyee.ca The Tyee is British Columbia's online source for News  Views  and Culture  published weekdays. It was created in 2003 by David Beers and has been swimming upstream against the media trends of our day  resolutely independent and reliably controversial. Like all good news sites  it provides an opportunity for readers to comment. The site is built and deployed using Bricolage. In 2006  I was approached to help convert their comments from VBulletin to using Drupal. To allow them to keep using bricolage  I developed the bricolage integration module for Drupal  and have been working on it with them since then. You can read about my most recent work on this site in my blog post. The biggest challenge of the site  other than my custom module  is the sheer size and traffic on the site. Over the past year  I upgraded the site from Drupal 4.7 to 5  and provided Drupal expertise for their new design. The site is excellently hosted at Gossamer Threads. ","http://thetyee.ca"
"Toronto Neighbourhood Centres: A Network of Service Agencies","03/19/2009 - 13:15","Visit the website: http://neighbourhoodcentres.ca/ Toronto Neighbourhood Centres is an association of non-profit multi-service organizations dedicated to strengthening local neighbourhoods and enabling diverse communities to work together to promote justice and a healthy life for all. I started working with them in 2006 on their PEAS project  designed to strengthen their members' respective organizations through a peer skills and knowledge sharing network. The on-line component of the project was implemented in Drupal/CiviCRM on a dedicated website. Recently  we integrated their previous static organizational site into the PEAS project and redesigned the look  and it launched as a new website in Mar 2009. ","http://neighbourhoodcentres.ca/"
"Canadian Environmental Law Association: An Action Apps Conversion","03/02/2009 - 10:23","Visit the website: http://www.cela.ca/ The Canadian Environmental Law Association (CELA) is a non-profit  public interest organization established in 1970 to use existing laws to protect the environment and to advocate environmental law reforms. CELA has a long history of involvement in some of the most important environmental litigation in Canada. As a legal aid clinic in Ontario  client representation focuses on the needs of low income communities and citizen-based organizations working in the public interest. CELA’s lawyers appear before all levels of federal and Ontario courts and tribunals on matters of statutory law and civil litigation. I started working with CELA in 2007  providing support for their site  built using ActionApps and hosted with the ActionApps main developer  E-connect. In 2008  they had various concerns about the continued use of ActionApps for their site  so we began converting it to Drupal. The new Drupal version launched in February 2009. The conversion of the old table-based visual design to a zen-based theme proved surprisingly straightforward. They liked the general feel and didn't have budget or interest in a complete redesign  so the colours  fonts and visual layout were mostly copied  but the html of the layout was modernized into the css based version instead of the old multiple nested table style. We also took the opportunity to widen the screen a bit and convert some of the graphic-intensive and javascript elements to css only  which makes the site seem snappier and improves the YSlow rating considerably. The other interesting challenge of the conversion was the use of ActionApps 'related item' technology for ""collections"" and other relating of items (now nodes) to each other. I used the relatedcontent module  enhanced with custom a reverse relationship block and form element  which has worked well. This is now the fourth ActionApp conversion I've worked on and one of my nice refinements has been a simple module that handles redirects from the old urls to the new ones. As well as handling external links to these old urls  it also has a filter that cleans up the old internal links. ","http://www.cela.ca/"
"Ontario Nonprofit Network: Building An Online Constituency","01/02/2009 - 10:40","Visit the website: http://ontariononprofitnetwork.ca/ The Ontario Nonprofit Network (ONN) is a network of networks that helps to build communication and coordination amongst nonprofit organizations working for the public benefit in Ontario. ONN brings together people and groups that want to work together to strengthen the nonprofit sector.  The work is action focused  creating opportunities for the emergence of new ideas  flexibly responding to opportunities and needs as they arise. ONN's theory of change is that when the sector is better connected (the network)  we will start to discover the needs and opportunities for collaboration (in constellations or communities of practice) that will lead to the sector being able to take action to affect changes that will benefit nonprofits in Ontario. I started working with ONN in November 2008  after the initial development and design had been completed by Design Guru. Since then we've refined some of the workflow and design details and built out some of the engagement elements. The network has limited funding  so most of the engagement with the sector takes places through the website and email. The new engagement elements include:  The use of organic groups to organize the ""Initiatives""  This was a great fit for what they were looking for and I was pleased to be working with OG again. The button This was fun little widget we invented to raise awareness of the importance of the nonprofit sector as a whole. Membership Listing I used webform and webform report to provide a simple interface to the existing bettermail membership signup form that automatically generated an editable membership listing.  ","http://ontariononprofitnetwork.ca/"
"Canadian Paraplegic Association Ontario: Accessibility","10/24/2008 - 15:31","Visit the website: http://www.cpaont.org/ CPA Ontario's mission is to assist persons with spinal cord injuries and other physical disabilities to achieve independence  self-reliance and full community participation. They were founded after WWII by vets with spinal cord injuries. Their site serves as a vehicle for outreach and also maintaining communication with their membership. I began working with CPA Ontario in March 2008. They were hosted on a proprietary system that was slow  expensive to host  inflexible and expensive to make changes to. The new communications coordinator had previously had some experience with Drupal and knew it was what they wanted. Also from that previous experience  she was sure she wanted as much 'out of the box' Drupal as possible - her previous Drupal project had gotten bogged down because of a lot of customizations. Because of a short timeline  we started with a stock Drupal theme called ""B7"" and tweaked it. In the end  I think it's pretty unrecognizable from the original  but it helped start things off. The accessibility requirements were not very specific  but we had the help of Jeff Orchard and I learned about and implemented quite a range of nifty pieces of html and javascript to help people who have limited use of mice and keyboards. The migration from the old system proved challenging because of the inability of the provider to export their data  but much of the old content ended up being not very up-to-date or useful. As of September 2008  the site has been gradually increasing in traffic  and we're beginning to implement some of the new features that will provide more public interactivity. ","http://www.cpaont.org/"
"Working Overseas: A Highly Customized Drupal Business Site","10/21/2008 - 03:00","Visit the website: http://www.workingoverseas.com/ The BIG Guide to Living and Working Overseas by Jean-Marc Hachey  is the world's best international career guide for college students & young professionals. The book has gone through four editions and has been in print since 1994. I've been working with Jean-Marc since 2004 to provide on-line access to his book. In 2007  I converted his site to Drupal  and from Dec 2007 to October 2008 we enhanced the on-line experience of using his book  particularly for university students preparing for overseas careers  with a collection of new features and tools  including private notes that users can keep  self-assessment quizzes  and a unique feature of ""yellow highlighting"". The new functionality was complemented by an excellent new design created by CASCO Design. ","http://www.workingoverseas.com/"
"Maquila Solidarity Network: CiviCRM Implementation and Migration.","10/01/2008 - 03:00"," The Maquila Solidarity Network (MSN) is a labour and women's rights organization that supports the efforts of workers in global supply chains to win improved wages and working conditions and a better quality of life. They're based in Toronto  and have been around since the early 1990s.  They contacted me to help move their constituent management from a collection of desktop systems to CiviCRM. Aside from supporting their work  I was especially happy to work on this project because they had come to me  understanding what they needed and were already convinced that CiviCRM was the right tool. An outside consultant volunteer had greatly helped them write out what they wanted from the project. Their main goal was to integrate all their systems into one  and having it web access enabled them to do this because of the distributed nature of their network. A number of other advantages to using CiviCRM were icing on the cake. The project started in August 2008 and was mainly finished by the end of September  remarkably quick thanks to the headstart they had provided with all their requirements work. In this case  I've been hosting CiviCRM as a stand-alone website separate from their main site because it's still using Drupal 4.7. ",""
"Revue Cinema: a Non-profit  Volunteer Run Website","10/01/2008 - 03:00"," The Revue Cinema is a community movie theatre that had been one of the oldest continuously running movie theatres in the country when it was closed by its owners in 2006. A non-profit community group sprang up to bring it back and in 2007  it re-opened and has been thriving since then. A site using Drupal was created  and in July 2008 I began working with them as their Drupal support. It turned out that the volunteer model had kept them afloat  but the website was a bit of a minefield. I moved the hosting to my server  switched their mail over to google apps  removed a plethora of unused modules and updated the remaining ones with their latest security patches. In fact  their volunteers were doing a remarkable job keeping the site looking good in spite of all this  but it was hard work for them (with big kudos to Jason Crowtz). My first fix was to add some automation to the way they entered and displayed their upcoming films  which involved writing a custom module to manage the posting of multiple screen times at a go  a problem that turns out to be similar to one that others have. For the future  I'm looking at implementing CiviCRM for them  and also adding more automation to their website to enable the volunteers who provide the content  reviews  etc. to post their stuff directly. ",""
"Rock Ridge Sport Horses: A Small Business Site","06/01/2008 - 03:00"," Rock ridge sport horses is a small family-run farm that provides breeding  training and boarding services  and also has quality horses for sale. It's owned and run by my sister Jenn and her husband Paul. You might have seen me wearing their sweatshirts. I created this site on my own initiative for them. I don't usually do this  because if a website iniative doesn't come from the client  then they're usually not interested enough to make it work. But family is like that  and I got a couple of chickens out of the deal. Also  the horse business is very conservative  and I thought it'd be a good idea to get her site up early before horse trading goes to the web - the longer your site has been up  the better from a google rank perspective. With our mother's help on QA (quality assurance)  the site is now functional and even fun  and Jenn is updating the site herself  including adding new photos.  I used the lightbox module for the neat jquery popups on the photos  and customized the gespaa theme for the design. ",""
"Telecentre.org","11/24/2007 - 14:13"," Telecentre.org is a project of IDRC  with the goal of encouraging and supporting ""telecentre communities"". A telecentre is the developing countries' version of a internet cafe  or library - a place where you can go for internet access. The main telecentre.org website describes itself as a community of people and organizations working together to improve the social and economic impact of grassroots telecentres. In January 2006 I was approached by Mark Surman to help out with their Drupal site that had been set up the previous year. It was a self-admitted 'beta' site  testing the limits of it's version of Drupal  and was suffering from performance load and confusion about how to implement what they wanted. I helped out in various ways: tuning their Drupal stack on the server  migrating the site from version 4.6 to 4.7  and simplifying the theme that was driving everyone crazy. Along the way  I also worked on their ""Drupal D-Groups"" project that became the Drupal Mailing List Groups project  did the bulk of the work to migrate the internationalization module from 4.6 to 4.7  and set them up with CiviCRM to do some neat things. In 2008 they attempted to farm out the server and Drupal responsibilities to a new outside contractor  but after 8 months of too little progress  they pulled the plug and passed the website project to Red Clay  who migrated it to some proprietary CMS. I'll note that 12 months later  they still don't have the multilingual capabilities they had on Drupal! ",""
"Green Party of Ontario: An Election Site","10/01/2007 - 03:00","Visit the website: http://www.gpo.ca/ In 2007  in what many consider the breakthrough election for the Green Party of Ontario  the party fielded a full slate of 107 candidates  receiving over 8.0%  up from 2.8% in the previous election. On election day  the site had more than 20 000 visitors. I got involved with the site only 3 months before that election  subcontracted by Hypenotic who had been hired to design the site. They didn't have any experience with Drupal or CiviCRM  which the GPO insisted on  so I ended up doing a lot of work.  The design was excellent and the site was a huge step forward for them  contributing to the electoral success. On a more personal level  back in 1993 I'd gone to the founding meeting of the Ontario Green Party  so it was interesting to see how far they'd come towards respectability and viability as a political party. The site uses CiviCRM for a donation form. ","http://www.gpo.ca/"
"Pedestrian Sundays at Kensington: Action Apps conversion and hosting","08/01/2007 - 03:00"," Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market is a car-free monthly event in Toronto's Kensington market during the summers. It's been running for a few years now  one of many grassroots  take-back-the-streets type events that are springing up. I was approached to help out in early 2007 by Yvonne Bambrick who coordinates the website. The site then was being hosted and developed by Jason Diceman  who was going to Venezuela  and the implementation in Action Apps wasn't quite working for them. So I migrated it to Drupal and they became one of the first hosts on my then-new hosting service  where it continues to live happily as one of my pro-bono projects. ",""
"Possibilities Project","07/17/2007 - 13:06","Visit the website: http://www.poss.ca/fr/accueil The Possibilities Online Employment Resource Centre (ERC) is a free resource to help Toronto job seekers find work. An initiative of Findhelp Information Services  Possibilities is an Employment Ontario project funded in part by the Government of Canada.  In 2006  I helped create the french version of their site  and the next year  I helped them update the english site and upgraded both to Drupal 5 from 4.7. ","http://www.poss.ca/fr/accueil"