Open Source

A while back I made a mind map of the Bioregional Organization structure from Chapter 14 of Permaculture Designer Manual.  You only need flash installed to view the following map.

http://www.thedirt.org/files/Mollison/Mollison.html

In addition, if you want to play around with the map, the software I used to create the map is free and runs in Mac, Windows and Linux and is called FreeMind.  There is a webpage for additional info about FreeMind ( http://www.thedirt.org/FreeMind ) and you can download the datafile (in XML) from here: http://www.thedirt.org/files/Mollison/Mollison.html_files/map.mm

As I hop around between various operating systems all the time (Mac, Windows, Linux, & Solaris) I have found the following applications to be very handy as I don't have to learn a new app for the various OSs. This also could come in handy if you are thinking about switching from Windows to Mac or Linux, if you get use to the follow apps (in place of Windows only apps) it will make your transition a lot easier.

 http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/blogs/the_os_agnostic

• Firefox: web browser. OS support includes GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Firefox was my first exposure to FOSS and still one of my favorites. Remains popular because it fits the needs for most users.

I finally got around to checking out the Firefox extensions that have come out in the last month and all I have to say is wow.  Two of them really jumped out Xinha Here and Spellbound which together add up to being a very nice word processor.  Xinha is a nice chrome app  that enables WYSIWYG editing in any html textarea and text input elements. Selecting "Xinha Here!" in the context menu opens Xinha editor on the client side. This allows you to edit the fields data in a WYSIWYG on any website without coping and pasting to secondary editor.  Spellbound is a spell checker that  enables spell checking in web forms such as html textarea. 

Over the last few days I have been madly hacking away on a CiviCRM project for Try/on Life Farm (TLC) as thye race to raise the money to buy the land so they can keep the area as TLC and not McMansions.  As you likely have figured out my contribution to this project is managing their data so it can be used more efficiently in the stretch run.

Anyway back to CiviCRM, this is my first time working with a CRM so I don't have a strong point of reference but I have to say that it seems to do most of the things that I want to do as of yet.  I have been kicking around the idea of using the CiviCRM as my personal address book as I have never been happy with any of the electronic address books that I have worked with.

I finally got around to building a new theme for biohabit.org and as always IE is being a pain in the ass.  If you are viewing this in IE, please go download & install Firefox 1.5 or just live with the extra wide bar. I'll try to make IE happy but as I don't have a Windows machine for personal use it might be a while.  This new theme is based on the new "CivicSpace" and the really nice part is I only had to update the visual.css file and setup several of the links as secondary links.

The was my first shot working with the CivicSpace theme and I relied heavily on the web developer extension in Firefox to make updates to visual.css.  Basically I just started changing values of anything that looked like it might be involved with what I was trying to do.   Very handy when dealing with CSS files, but very illegal if you are doing it with wire tapping.  I also designed in a hand way of flagging me that I'm still logged in via only showing the main navigation menu in the left column when you are logged in.  As nothing else is in the left column if you are not logged in you only see the main body and the right hand column.  If you have an suggestions or know how to fix the extra thick bar let me know!