This is our last week at Mission Research.

We need to be finished by Friday. There are a few cosmetic tasks on the client side, and we need to finish the server side.

There will be some long days this week.

We've got almost all the client-side functionality working, and are making one last big change to the user interface. Hopefully the last big change.

It seems like after weeks of slow progress that the changes are happening very quickly. Just a little more work on the server side, some cleanup, and the end is in sight.

until the end of our internship. There's a lot of work left to be done.

We need to finalize the user interface, get the dialogs working, implement caching, and test.

I've spent the past couple of days cleaning up the user interface for the addin. It seems to go quite slowly, one small detail at a time instead of making lots of progress. But it's coming together nicely, and it looks a lot better.

We need to refactor the code significantly. I knew this before, but could avoid it no longer when I realized that there were three functions that did almost exactly the same thing, and the change I was about to make would double that. The alternative was to add a switch to each function to test the conditions under which it was being called. Since that is too ugly, and I can't bear to have five superfluous functions, it's time to refactor.

I'm doing some more work on the functional specification so that we can get some feedback on what it looks like and how people react to the user interface. It's including a lot of screenshots so that people can actually see what we've been talking about. Dave suggested writing up the specification as a web page, using Frontpage, the Microsoft web site editor / designer.

I hadn't used Frontpage before today, so I took some time to run through a couple tutorials. They were a good way to get started and learn how the system works. Then I started working on the spec, and despite some trouble getting the thumbnails to display correctly, got most of what we want down.

Hopefully the spec will be ready to distribute tomorrow.

We spent last week resolving technical issues and putting the pieces of the application together. There's a lot of stuff we wanted to do, but weren't quite sure how to do. We figured out how to do most of it.

Our thanks to all the customers who have responded with your great ideas and suggestions. We should have a demo to look at by the end of next week. I will send a progress report by email to everyone who requested to be contacted.

This week I'll be prototyping the user interface and finishing up some of the tech stuff from last week, like local caching of data.

Although we haven't blogged in a while, we've been quite busy. Last week was functional specs and contacting customers, and this week we are running through the implementation details to make sure that we don't find any surprises.

Today we got links and tags to display in side-by-side columns and wrote data to a file using Graphite calls. Right now I'm working on reading the XML data back into GiftWorks.

I can't say that I've "had a bad day."

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.