Well, it’s free for 501(c)3 nonprofits, up to 10,000 emails a month. Vertical response is a Email marketing company that offers email newsletter services. I am also impressed with their green activities in their office.
Archive for the 'technology' Category
Wow, check out the Wordpress app on the iTunes app store!
Ross and I have been doing some work for Green Gorilla — continuing to develop Sustainable Websites significant expertise in WordPress and SEO for WordPress. It’s been a pleasure to work with Jay and Reenita — because they both understand that SEO is a creative and technical process — and want to learn more about it, and because they are already on the WordPress system and want to learn more about it, too. I’m finding that our best clients always want to learn more, and are willing to pay for our time and expertise that we’ve accumulated over the years. It’s a whole different dynamic than a client that just says “tell me how much it’s going to cost and all my options - oh and go and do all the research for free”. Anyway - they are doing some great stuff with Environmental Education and it’s definitely worth checking out the show. Worth watching and also worth looking at a wonderfully designed WordPress site.
Gorilla in the Greenhouse is an action-packed, web-based animated show that inspires kids to take real-world steps towards a healthy planet. The show is set in a magical greenhouse in San Francisco, and features a visionary green gorilla and four kids who use their imagination, their network and their music to tackle the environmental challenges facing their generation.
“Kids can save the world,” says Eli Noyes, kid’s TV veteran and director of the show. “This is the kind of show that will travel effortlessly from the TV to the Internet to the real world. It is by nature interactive, because kids can do in the real world what they see our virtual kids doing. And every imaginary character and action in the show has an analogous real life counterpart.”
The pilot episode, entitled The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, follows the kids as they face a demented plot by Dr. Morlon Hufflebot to create an island of plastic bags in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. In the show, the kids travel to the island to observe the situation, go undercover into the plastic bag factory and then foil the plot though multiple actions. They spread their green message through their social networks, rally cities to ban plastic bags, design a new eco-friendly bag and create awareness through their original song “Bag the Bag (The Gyre Song)”. The next episode planned for later in 2008 will follow the kids through adventures exploring the challenge of energy efficiency.
“When I was a kid, I loved Schoolhouse Rock. The great songs and stories gave us a context for learning how the world worked,” says, Jay Golden, creator of the show. “Gorilla in the Greenhouse is our way of introducing this generation to a world of possibility through story. Instead of ‘put in a new light bulb’, we want to show the most over-the-top environmental scenarios transformed by vision, collaboration and great music. So we decided to start with a huge island of plastic bags.”
The show is a presentation of SustainLane, a green media company based in San Francisco, and created by SustainLane’s VP of New Media, former Free Range Studios and Shockwave.com producer Jay Golden, The show is produced by Ralph Guggenheim, a founding member of Pixar, and producer of Oscar-winning short film “Tin Toy” and the classic animated feature “Toy Story.” Animation, art direction and creative consultation for the show is done by Golden’s former teammates at Free Range Studios, known for its wildly successful, cause-based viral movies such as “The Meatrix”, “Story of Stuff” and “Grocery Store Wars”. Gorilla director Eli Noyes, an academy award nominee, has also directed segments for MTV’s animated showcase “Liquid Television” and Sesame Street’s “Sand Alphabet” and “Mad Painter”.
The show and the curriculum will be broadcast to National Geographic’s platform of over 1 million kids. It is also distributed through the home site www.greengorilla.com.
There are so many options available to photographers to create a professional looking portfolio site. Here are just a few I’ve run across in the past couple of months.
SmugMug.com offers template based sites and includes a way to sell your photos, printing, and custom watermarks.
Satellite powered by a flickr professional account. You also need a web hosting account that supports the php programming language to install Satellite on. You don’t have to know any php - but knowing some basic HTML helps. Despite all these steps, this is my current favorite because it’s customizable, can be hosted on many website accounts, and gives you a real web hosting account to play with, which gives you additional benefits of having you@yourdomainname.com email, and the ability to install a WordPress blog like the one you are reading now. To see an example of a Satellite powered site I recently created for a friend, check out Colleen Todd’s. portfolio.
Worried about copying of your images? Consider using steganography (like DigiMarc in Adobe Photoshop) to digitally watermark your photos, although it has been said it reduces quality. An alternative is to put a “bug” in a corner of the image with your name. This can be done in batch mode with a program like iWatermark. Personally, I prefer the bug method, for reasons Ken Rockwell explains.
Want to include a slideshow widget on your site? Check out the Google AJAX Feed Slideshow widget.
Do it yourself portfolios: (free) http://start.uber.com/design can be used for photography or any artwork.
If you have a mac, you may already have the the Apple iLife suite, including iPhoto and iWeb and a dotMac account which can help you make a decent looking portfolio site.
If any of the above methods doesn’t give you a professional web address (URL) of your own, like www.mynamephotos.com - you can use domain masking at a registrar (like SustainableDomains.com) to point to the computer generated URL.
Know of any others, or had experience with the above that you can share? Please let us know in the comments below!
2007 may go down as the year people stopped just talking about Green and actually did something about it. According to Yahoo!’s top 10 environmental search terms for 2007, consumers are moving beyond awareness to become more action-oriented about the environment and its impact on climate change.
Top 10 Environmental Searches in 2007
- Recycling
- Global Warming
- Freecyle
- Earth
- Pollution
- Al Gore
- Environmental Protection Agency
- Live Earth
- Hybrid Cars
- Solar Energy
Source: www.yahoo.com
New terms like “freecycle” (a Network to promote waste reduction) popped up this year, while “carbon footprint” and “carbon credits” reached a growing impression as part of the green vernacular. 2007 also saw queries on global warming reach their highest level ever — throughout the summer, buzz on “stop global warming” boomed, as conscientious citizens looked to reduce their carbon footprint.
More eco-friendly searches arose surrounding “pollution”, and peopleused Yahoo! Search to monitor what the “Environmental Protection Agency” was doing about these issues. “Hybrid cars”, “solar energy”, and “recycling” topics also proved popular for those seeking a more environmentally friendly lifestyle.
There are many presentations about sustainability available on the slide-sharing service SlideShare.net. Why share your slides? Well, think about the increase in exposure for your ideas and brand that you can achieve by participating, and helping to create online community for slides specific to sustainability issues. — just by tagging your slideshow with relevant keywords like sustainability, organics, etc.
(from the slideshare.net FAQ) You can upload your PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Keynote or PDF files, tag them, embed them into your blog or website, browse others’ presentations, and comment on individual slides. What’s more, the transcripts of your presentation will be indexed by internet search engines and show up in search results. It’s a great way to share your ideas with others, or to learn from other people.
Ideally, I’d have time to create a website that interfaces with their Slideshare API to allow users to post and tag presentations directly from SustainableMarketing.com - one of these weeks when I have a few days just to play with Ruby
Edit: I created a Slideshare group called SustainableMarketing for collecting examples of good presentations related to the topic of sustainable marketing. Join the group to be notified of updates and add examples of great slide shows!
Technorati Tags:
sustainability, slideshare, communitymarketing
Or what to do when rm * says “argument list too long” error.
Note this post marks the addition/resuming of geeky (mostly ruby) programming posts to the blog. I’l still have all the regular sustainable marketing and eco-geek content, and will be modifying my feeds so that you can decide which content you want to subscribe to. I tried running two blogs but it was too much work to decide which one to post in! For now, you can also use the menu items at the top of the page to sort by category
Rails apps create session files that are stored in the /tmp/sessions folder. And this folder tends to fill up with old files if you leave it too long. You might get so many files in there that the rm command does not work anymore.
[~/cadvbe/tmp/sessions]# rm *
-jailshell: /bin/rm: Argument list too long
[~/cadvbe/tmp/sessions]# ls -1 | wc -l
144433
[~/cadvbe/tmp/sessions]# find . -name 'ruby_sess*' | xargs rm
[~/cadvbe/tmp/sessions]# ls
./ ../ .svn/
The command ls -1 | wc -l counts how many files were in the directory. Over 144 thousand! Instead, use find . -name 'ruby_sess*' | xargs rm to find all the session files and pipe them to the rm command one at a time. This works.
Thanks to MoundAlexis.com for the idea, and read more on ruby sessions and automatically deleting them with a cron job here
Technorati Tags:
rails, rubyonrails, rm, linux, sessions
This was back in June, but I was so busy on a consulting project (details soon) that I haven’t been blogging very much.
Thanks so much to Ryanne and Jay for taking the time to interview me and edit and produce the video! I recommend that any bay area (and beyond) green companies with interesting stories check out their blog Ryan is Hungry.
This is really just a domain forwarding and masking hack, but I think it could be useful. I’ve been entering in any event I find in the green and sustainability area to Yahoo’s upcoming event calendar service, and tagging them with “sustainability”. I also had the domain name SustainabilityCalendar.com sitting around, doing nothing, after various aborted PHP projects. So, I just used the SustainableDomains.com (a reseller program with GoDaddy) domain forwarding and masking service to point to the tag page for sustainability, and voilà , SustainabilityCalendar.com (or SustainabilityCalendar.org ) is born.
Enjoy it, and please contribute by adding your own events to Upcoming.yahoo.com, and tagging them with the tag “sustainability”. Don’t forget, if your event is related to marketing, submit it to the “Sustainable Marketing” group, and after it is approved, will end up on the home page of SustainableMarketing.com, which gets over 15,000 unique visitors a month.
Technorati Tags: sustainability, sustainablemarketing, upcoming.org
Every organization that holds events has a need to promote the event, to make sure more people show up, and to get the right people there. The current practice of events being promoted via emails is not working because of information glut, people’s reluctance to sign up for more email newsletters, and organizations only promoting their own events. Using technologies such as Microformats and Upcoming.org can make sure that the message about your events gets widely distributed, get the info to key influencers and connectors, and can help build momentum for increased attendance. The efficiencies gained may also reduce your organizations need to spend money on physical resources such as direct mail, flyers, and posters, and reduce waste.
Microformats are a special way of tagging HTML that is easy to learn. According to Andy Mitchell they are, “additions to your web page that makes your data readable by machines and humans alike. Microformats are simple to create, simple to [use], and only require you to build on existing data (i.e. not replace it). They are useful right now and supported by the likes of Yahoo and Technorati. Key industry figures, such as Tim O’Reilly and Bill Gates, have publicly discussed their importance. Right now, microformats can be used to let users easily extract people/event information from your website for their organizer software (like Outlook).” If you have an online calendar, which means it’s in HTML, there’s no good reason that it couldn’t be in the hCalendar microformat. There is even an online wizard, the hCalendar creator, that require only knowing just enough HTML to know where to paste the code in the page.
For the prospective attendee of your event, if your site uses hCalendar, using it can make it as easy as pointing at the event, and importing the event into Outlook or Mac Calendar. Add the common practice of syncing your personal computer’s calendar to your mobile device (phone, blackberry, etc.) and you’ll have people automatically reminded of the event.
Upcoming.org makes it even easier to use Microformats, and adds the bonus of creating a virtual crowd of co-promoters that influence their networks of friends and contacts. You can add your event details via the form on their site. You can use it to send out emails to your prospective attendees. You can tag your event with key words like “sustainability” and “green”. People can then use their pc, mac, or online calendar to automatically show tagged events. (Presumably from sustainability, or green tags, although you could just as easily add fruititarian knitters if you wanted)
Also, with upcoming.org’s blog widget (such as the one in the sidebar of this blog) you can ensure that attendees of your event help promote the event to their networks. Targeting early adopters of technology can yield a big return because they also tend to be influencers.
Both of these services allow you to get on people’s personal calendars easier. And that’s great for access, because they are a lot more likely to look at their own calendar, than your email from last month, that’s somewhere in their mailbox with 1000 other unread messages. It’s also a completely free standard format, based on open source principles, which is a good match with the ethos of sustainability.
P.S. if you’re interested in more technical details, there are some great resources. Technorati’s Kitchen has a microformats search engine. Check out the source of the BarCamp Sandbox page, it includes a javascript widget that reads hCalendar events from another page (which could be any other page on the web). You could use rel-tag to tag your hCalendar events with “sustainability” and we’d be well on our way as a community to having a comprehensive event calendar. Just think if we added geo microformatting for location - we would be able to create a mashup with local sustainability events. And there is a new book: “Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0″ (John Allsopp)
A challenge: if several large organizations, or the biggest (and my favorite) bay area eco calendars that I know of (ecology center and organic architect’s events start publishing microformats or using upcoming.org, I will resume work on the sustainabilitycalendar.org/com project project to aggregate events related to sustainability. Let me know what you think here in the comments!
Technorati Tags: green marketing, microformats, opensourcemarketing, organicmarketing, upcoming.org, sustainability, sustainablemarketing
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