“Constantly seek criticism. … A well thought out critique of whatever you are doing is as valuable as gold.”- Elon Musk
and….
“If you do the simple math, if somebody else is working 50 hours and you are working 100, you’ll get twice as much done in the course of a year as the other company.”
“Just work like hell. You’ve gotta put in 80, 100 hour work weeks.” – Elon Musk
“Starting a business. Number 1 is having a high pain threshold.” – Elon Musk
“You are always going to buy the trusted brand unless there is a BIG difference.” – Elon Musk
“Constantly seek criticism. … A well thought out critique of whatever you are doing is as valuable as gold.” – Elon Musk
“Usually your friends know what is wrong. They don’t want to tell you because they don’t want to hurt you. … Usually your friends are right. …. You should take the approach that as an entrepreneur you are wrong. You want to be less wrong.” – Elon Musk
Google recently announced a partnership with Owox’s data importer for analytics making it available for free. Specifically you can now import costs, or other data pretending to be costs such as number of event attendees, to compare in google analytics.
A few cool things in the land of Tendenci clients and open source users internationally to share.
Client Created iPhone and Android Apps
Kudos to www.hapl.org and the developer Jaime Lossada who created this application for the iphone and android on top of Tendenci. This was completely the work of Jaime so if you have questions please reach out to him directly.
We just think it’s cool to see what “Open” software enables people to do versus closed-old-world-options.
Translations
And we’ve had a few requests lately for translations via Transifex as well as new languages to add. Transifex it integrates with github and Open Source Projects like Tendenci.
Part of Tendenci 6 ‘s push for greater openness is making it easier to get your data.
We’ve talked about the django-sql-explorer from ePantry in a previous post, but it can be overkill in some cases. A much simpler process is to use the prebuilt reports and exports!
For example on your Tendenci 6 site there is a page at: /memberships/reports/ accessible from the “apps” menu here (number 7 – requires super-user access):
Current Members
Current Members Roster
Current Members Quick List
Current Member Totals by Company
Membership Trends
Memberships Over Time
Active Members YTD
Members YTD by Type
Member Data
Membership Joins Report Summary
Active Memberships, filterable by join date
Expired Memberships, filterable by expire date
Renewed Members, filterable by renew date
Pending Memberships
Members in Renewal Period
Expired Members in Grace Period
Active, Pending & Expired Members by Type
Financial Reporting
Membership Invoices
User Reports
Administrators
Site Users Added
User Activity Summary
User Access
Contacts Report
Corporate Membership Summary
Top Spenders
Users not in Groups
Management Tools
Similar Users List
User Import
User Export
Membership Import
Membership Export
On screen it looks like this:
Built in Membership Reports and Exports in Addition to Admin and Explorer
We like the number 3 and non-profits like to save money and dedicate their funds to their causes. Combine them and you get a super short list of 3 cool things that are free or low cost for nonprofits and associations to control costs.
If people don’t know how to do something, make them learn. That’s how Dropbox went from having 3 to 4 engineers regularly contributing to the iOS code base to over 30. “If you’re doing things right, something will always be a little bit broken. Most importantly, tell everybody that a little bit of chaos is okay,” Agarwal says
We’ve had a lot of crucial conversations lately about decisions that we made between 2006 and 2010. Yup, really. We are explaining now about how we are possibly too far ahead of the curve and why if you give it a bit of time, it will make you look like a rock-star.
MobileGeddon being a great example of how our early adopters are benefiting the absolute most!
We started using Python, the programming language named after Monty Python, in 2004 if not earlier. We first tested Pinax in 2008 if not earlier under J who was running our programming team.
We used Python extensively in our old environment to move files and push out content to our sites. Tasks that are now done by Puppet and Chef and Docker-Compose. We rolled our own using Python on Windows.
So for the curious, that explains why we have this huge depth of knowledge on Python programming dating back to when nobody heard of it. We’ve had to train numerous graduates of Tech, UofH, Aggies, Rice, Penn State, etc, what Python even was!
But that is all ancient history. Why? Because Python is now number 1!
It’s hard to predict the future. We started out writing our own compete web framework in ASP. We were too early in 2001. PHP soon arrived and, being basically identical but open source, the outcome was PHP won. It should have, and did, win. We were too early. But with timing there is also a bit of luck.
I’ll do another post about GIS and mapping and why our move to strictly Postgres with GIS enabled is working out so well. Another post. And I’ll edit this one with links soon. Just needed to get the content out.
Bootstrap3. – Because we know that we take gambles on technology and they have an impact. On you. And that is serious business. We take it seriously as evidenced by our decision to shut down Windows in line with Microsoft’s EOL policies. These are hard choices. Crucial Conversations. We’re the messenger.
And we CARE about YOU. Our clients. The future is bright. We picked our technology future amazingly well. Too well, so now perhaps our problems is more one of resources. And we’ll work through that.
Thank you. If I can leave you with one thought – it is this. THANK YOU! For those who stuck with us, WOW, um… our position for search and the future is crazy good. Open Source means freedom. Results mean donations and sales. Software means sustainable business models.
We appreciate you. Yes closure for some was hard. We wish you the best. We appreciated your time with us while it lasted longer than a Honda. As some depart and some charge forward, I’m especially excited about those who chose to charge forward.
We, you and us, we didn’t “guess” right. We did our homework and validation came ironically on April 21, the same day mobilegeddon hit and our Tendenci 6 clients jumped up in the search rankings. Luck? Hard work? I don’t know.
What do I know? I know how to serve. I serve y’all.
To our Tendenci 5 and 6 clients. We will be applying updates to the sites tonight and tomorrow night. Please expect intermittent outages of up to 30 minutes during the course of the upgrades as we migrate sites and continue our focus on increased security.
Note these will be rolling updates and will not hit every site. While they are preventative in nature, they are critically important to prevent future issues.
Seriously, we love you, but off you go. Go check out the source code at https://github.com/tendenci/ or something. None of this blog post applies to those of you in the 95% majority of our clients.
This isn’t to say we don’t think you look great today. You do! And we’re looking forward to being able to focus on YOU more after tomorrow.
Upgrading Clients – YEA!!!
A HUGE THANK YOU to all of our former T4 clients who have chosen to stay with us and upgrade to Tendenci 6.
As we’ve communicated to each of you individually, there may be a period where we have a holder page up for a bit and unlike a usual long term project we will be going live and incrementally flushing out the site. It’s a lot of sites. We are going to focus on functionality first, SEO next and then bring more uniqueness of design per the scope of each of your migration projects.
We’re excited for both of the groups above that we will be focused on one technology stack and can accelerate Tendenci’s growth.
Microsoft Servers Offline Tomorrow April 21 at 12:00 CST
For our former clients who were running on Tendenci 4 and are choosing to leave, we’re sorry to see you go. I get it. I hated the idea of giving up my blackberry because “it just worked”. Yet now I can’t imagine not having a smart phone. Software is emotional. It just is.
[IMPORTANT! If you are pointed at our DNS Servers or Email Servers make sure your new provider makes these updates!]
I believe we have communicated with everyone in person at this point, and the remaining group is small.
This is just a courtesy reminder that you may want to have your new provider make their DNS entries tonight to avoid any downtime.Don’t forget they will need to set up email relays and transfer dns servers so be nice to your new vendor and give them another reminder please as all of us want to see you succeed.
A website is an ecosystem of databases and content and media and email and relays. Be sure your new provider, if you chose to leave, is on top of it.
Please know that we have appreciated your business and wish you the best in the future. You are always welcome back, or even consider using Tendenci Open Source with another company. That’s the point – Freedom!
