I have a piece on WorldChanging today about using Drupal's Aggregator2 module as a news tracking tool. The piece was partly inspired by a recent inquiry about why to use Aggregator2 rather than Drupal's default:
Aggregator2 turns the Drupal platform into a powerful tool for news tracking and republishing by offering options for customizing news feeds, tagging news items, and moderating incoming news. That feature set makes Aggregator2 an exceptionally flexible choice for setting up a nonprofit news tracker that aggregates news from a wide range of blogs, news sites and search engines. Because Aggregator2 saves each individual item as an independent node (like a web page) in Drupal, you can edit or annotate news items after you bring them onto your site. Because Aggregator2 lets you assign different tags to different incoming feeds, you can set up different news pages for different topics, and direct news to show up on the appropriate pages. And Aggregator2 is also a terrific tool for integrating content from multiple related web sites or overlapping organizations.
Read the whole story on WorldChanging.
If you work at the intersection of technology and community-building, we hope you'll join us for a May 4th gathering of Social Tech Brewing's Vancouver chapter. Social Tech Brewing brings together folks from nonprofit organizations, community service, social activism, social ventures and technology to share ideas — and beer!
Our May 4th event will look forward to the June meeting of the UN's World Urban Forum (WUF) here in Vancouver. WUF will bring a remarkable range of government leaders, community development workers and urban activists to Vancouver to talk about the future of sustainable cities. And the lead-up to WUF has already featured one of the Net's most ambitious online dialogue efforts to date, the Habitat Jam.
The STB meeting on May 4th will feature a short panel and Q&A session to illuminate some of the innovative technology projects that are happneing around the WUF meeting. We'll hear from one of the members of the Habitat Jam team about what was learned from the Jam experiment. And we'll also hear from Steven Forth of the Global Urban Sustainable Solutions Exchange, a Vancouver-based information and social networking resource that will launch at the WUF in June.
The panel will start at 6:15 and wrap by 6:45, so please come early so you can be part of the discussion. And plan to stick around for another hour after the panel to be part of the beer drinking, gossip exchange, and general consipracy-hatching.
We hope to see you there! Please RSVP on Upcoming.org
Event details
Social Tech Brewing Vancouver
Thurday, May 4th
6pm-8pm
at
The Whip (map)
209 6th Avenue East (at Main), Vancouver
RSVP on Upcoming.org
Any questions? Email info@socialsignal.com
Today we're launching a new feature on NetSquared: Net2Learn. Net2Learn (http://learn.netsquared.org) is a collection of resource centers on topics that matter to nonprofits: topics like Online P.R. for nonprofits, Managing an online community forum, and 10 tools you need now. Best of all, Net2Learn makes it easy for you to contribute your favorite web links, resources and examples to each resource center — or to create a new resource center yourself.
When I opened up my custom Google home page this morning I noticed that one of the most popular del.icio.us links for today was a guide to creating a block hover effect for a list of links. This sounded cool — basically, a neater-looking alternative to links that simply change colour when you mouse over them — so I checked it out.
And what does this popular page turn out to be? A tribute to the brilliant work that NetSquared’s designer, Veerle Pieters, has done in redesigning her own blog. So brilliant, in fact, that somebody went to the trouble of documenting exactly how she accomplished her link rollover effect.
As we gear up to send out our very first Social Signal e-newsletter, I’m investigating some of the e-mail newsletter tools out there. There’s a lot to be said for using a tool that’s integrated with the rest of your web site — like the NetSquared Newsletter, which is powered by Drupal — but there are some additional bells and whistles that come with a dedicated e-mail tool. There’s a really fabulous round-up of the options over at Idealware.
If you want to see which tool we choose, then sign up for our newsletter.
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