The addin is almost finished! All the functionality is working, it just needs a few finishing touches. I have not blogged in a while because we have been busy. It's been a whirlwind last few weeks, but with good results.

Rob and I have both had a great time working here and learned a ton of new stuff in the area of web programming

We need YOUR knowledge and experience to help build an add-in to GiftWorks.

There are a lot of resources for non-profit organizations available on the web, but finding the ones that are useful can be difficult. Sharing resources among the GiftWorks community will make it easier. In order to help users accomplish this, we are building an application that does two things: It lets you find websites that help other GiftWorks users, and share websites that help you.

We are asking for links to websites that you have found useful in your work. If you have any links that you wish to contribute, please click here. Tips on fund raising, outreach, organizing, and development are welcome. Anything that you have found useful, new, or thought-provoking and would like to share with others is welcome. We will be emailing and calling some customers to get feedback and suggestions over the course of the project. If you would like to be part of this group, please email us with your name and organization.

E-mail Rob
E-mail Jon

We hope to have an add-in demo available for viewing by July 7.

Thanks in advance for your help!

On Friday Dave set up a server page for us on our web server. So far we haven't done too much with it.

Mainly we've been learning ASP and practicing our skills with VBScript using our test server. Hopefully we'll have some working code on the real server by the time Dave gets back from vacation.

Rob was out sick today so i worked on writing some VBScript code and using ASP to fetch and display XML from the del.icio.us server.

Rob and I have begun designing the Community Web Resource add-in. One thing I am learning is the usefulness of a whiteboard. It really helps you get your thoughts organized. It's pretty cool because this is probably the first time I am designing a piece of software (other than a game). We plan to both design and develop as we go along but right now we are just laying out the general framework.

Rob found this cartoon online. Hopefully this is what we will avoid. :)

Community Web Resources!

After talking with everyone yesterday and reviewing the results of the survey, we made our decision.

Thanks to everyone for giving us your time and thoughtful feedback.

Rob and I have spent most of the week refining and organizing our ideas for what we are going to develop in this internship. We have narrowed it down to three main possibilities: an SDK, a project management add-in using Basecamp, or a community resource add-in using del.icio.us.

Just as review, Rob and I spent the first 2 weeks of our internship, learning all kinds of new programming technologies and techniques. We did a few small projects that Dave assigned us and even learned the basics of the GiftWorks API and add-in structure (both still largely undocumented). Most importantly, we spent time playing with web services to find out what they can do for GiftWorks and talked to people in the company to listen to their ideas and generate our own.

In week #3 we spent most of our putting it all together into 3 well defined summer projects. We have written proposal documents for each of the 3 and distributed them to everyone here at Mission Research. Even though we will only be using one of the ideas, it was still very helpful to fully develop all 3. It helped us organize the huge mass of possibilities swimming in our heads and figure out what goes with what.

Monday is the big day. We will have a meeting with everyone where we present our ideas and have a group discussion a figure out which option will be best for Mission Research, for the customers, and for us (the interns). Then we will have 7 weeks to develop it.

Decisions decisions...

My mission trip is over and its good to be back. I went with a church group down to Mississippi in the area of Biloxi. We stayed at the C.O.R.E. base camp for 5 days and helped with the repair and reconstruction of people's homes that were damaged by Hurricane Katrina last year. It was a great experience but now I am ready to continue my work here at Mission Research.

Here are a few pictures:

Our mission team.

This is the tent camp where we stayed. Fortunately the tents were air conditioned because it was very hot down there.

There is still a lot of damage down there. This used to be a casino.

Here is a ruined house.

This lighthouse was bound to its concrete foundation by dozens of inch-thick steel bars, but the hurricane ripped it off and blew it over 100 yards away.

We worked most of the week at one house, doing tile floors. This is me working in the first room.

We had to cut partial tiles to use along the walls.

This is the first room finished.

This is the team working on the second room. There wasn't enough of the tan colored tile to finish this room, so we bought some green tile to finish the center.

Finishing up on Friday.

This is the family who owned the home. The man in the back is the Pastor from our team.

Del.icio.us, for those who don't know, is an online system for bookmarking your favorite web links. All you need to do to sign up is go to http://del.icio.us/register. It will help you set up your toolbar with a post button, so that any time you find a site you like, you can easily post it on del.icio.us. It also allows you to tag (i.e. label) your links. For example, if you were storing a bunch of search engines you could tag each link with "SearchEngine" then later you could filter your entire list by that tag and get a list of links to your favorite search engines.

We are developing a GiftWorks addin called WebLinks that uses AJAX and DHTML and the del.icio.us API to allow users to store useful links right inside GiftWorks. Currently, the addin loads the links that are stored on your del.icio.us account and it is able to do tag searches. We are adding features that allow users to store, edit, and delete links right from GiftWorks. This second task has proved to be more difficult than the first part because it involves using the GiftWorks dialog boxes in addition to basic web pages. One major problem we have encountered so far is that prototype.js (the JavaScript/AJAX library we are using) has some conflicts with the GiftWorks dialog framework. We will be able to post the addin eventually when these problems are resolved. More to come...

The goal for the day is to get our del.icio.us tags into GiftWorks in a format that is consistent with the rest of GW and put tags on the side.

Busy day!

Hello software development world!

My name is Jon Hollinger, and I hail from Millersville University. during the semester of Spring 2006 two of my professors offered me a summer internship here at Mission Research. I decided to take this internship for several reasons. First of all, it was an opportunity to get a paid internship without going through Millersville's CAP office which costs several hundred dollars. Secondly, I would have the opportunity to learn about various web programming technologies that I was unfamiliar with before. I have already been learning quite a bit about JavaScript, VBScript, XML, AJAX, DHTML, and Cascading Style Sheets. Thirdly, Mission Research is a local, fast growing, start up company that seems to be doing big things in the nonprofit world. They seem to have found a definite niche and a good mission, and are thus far, quite successful.

During this internship, Rob and I hope to be successful in integrating various web services with GiftWorks to add many useful features to the software. We'll keep you posted.

This is not only our first blog entry, but the first entry into several new areas.

It's Tuesday, our second day of the internship. It's our first entry into DHTML, XML, and Ajax. There may be some VB and Ruby on Rails thrown in as well.

Working with the non-profit community will be a new experience for both of us. The plan is to come up with some useful ideas for GiftWorks, then implement and deploy.

It will be an exciting, educational, and (hopefully) productive summer.