Many Pies

Many Pies

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Internaut day - 25 years ago I got onto the web

25 years ago I heard about this program from a USENET newsgroup called Mosaic. I downloaded and installed it. As they say: Mind. Blown. All the pages had a grey background. The images would download one by one, and you could see each line of pixels loading. A later version would download the pictures simultaneously.

I remember downloading a quicktime movie of a jet powered sledge. It took ages, but it was groundbreaking.

Someone once asked me about the difference between the web and the internet. I didn't give a very good answer, but since then I've though of a good analogy: we had roads (internet) before we had cars (webpages). Other traffic travels on the roads like horses (FTP) but it's mostly cars (webpages).

Thursday, August 18, 2016

Yes, we are turning it off and on again

The Wycliffe UK and Ireland blog contains a post about the project that is taking most of my time at the moment. For those who'd like more technical details, here are some:

The "all-encompassing systems upgrade" refers to the change from Raiser's Edge, our donor management system, to the Causeview app on Salesforce, as I've blogged about in my post Raiser's Edge to Causeview/Salesforce.

The main work before go live is both data migration and configuration. I've got a post in draft about configuration, as there's quite a lot that can be done, as well as some things you just can't do, without re-writing a given feature from scratch, or getting another app to do it.

In my previous post I didn't credit the company that's helping us with the implementation: Purple Vision. They have the primary relationship with Breakeven, the company that produces Causeview, in order to make sure that it does what we want (because Causeview does it, because they've customised it, or because we've customised it). They are also doing some training, I'm not doing it all myself.

If you want even more technical details, please feel free to comment or contact me directly. (Enough people manage to find me so I think you can work out how to do that.)