Designed and fabricated in Chicago by Khaim Pinkhasik (born 1940)
30” H x 40” W SM 626
The American Flag window honors the principles of American liberty and the victims of the September 11, 2001 attacks. The American Flag is a symbol of freedom, justice and the rule of law. The September 11 attacks evoked a global response in support of these universal principles. The international scope of the tragedy was manifest, with citizens of dozens of countries being among the several thousand victims.
It is significant that The American Flag window was designed by a Russian who immigrated to the United States and became a U.S. citizen. Khaim Pinkhasik was born in Minsk, Russia in 1040 and emigrated to the United States in 1980 to pursue artistic freedom. Before coming to the United States, he received much acclaim in Russia for his state-sponsored mosaic portraits of Soviet leaders. Desiring more freedom for artistic expression, however, Pinkhasik came to the United States and settled in Chicago in 1982, where he currently lives with his wife Valentina.
You should backup your website yourself on a regular basis. It is after all YOUR web site, right?
We see questions in help desk tickets that are usually phrased differently like “how can I get a static version of my site?” or “do you use FTP” or similar but basically it’s the same question. And it is a great question. At Tendenci we believe that while all vendors don’t have to be open source like Tendenci is (full source code available at https://github.com/tendenci/ ) they should at least make it easy for you to get your content. But they don’t. So let’s show you how to get it anyway.
Let’s pretend you want to download an entire static (meaning not-database driven but looks almost identical) version of your site on a Mac. First the free way to do it:
Then you have to launch terminal. I know terminal is kind of scary if you haven’t used it much so I’ll show you a paid version way of downloading your site in a sec. First the “free” way. Launch terminal on your Mac. It should look something like this:
The next line looks complicated. It kind of is, but just copy and paste it replacing the part that reads MYWEBSITE with your web site. You do have to include the “http” part so it’s easiest to go to your site in a web browser and copy it from the address bar.
Everything after the blue part (and again copy from where I pasted it above just change the URL to be yours), but everything after the blue part is just the system starting to download the files. It DOES cause load on the server so perhaps don’t run it at lunch or during high traffic times. When it’s done you should be able to see it in finder and it should look about like this.
BUT, this isn’t currently on a web server. Still you can view it in yor web browser by clicking the “index.html” file for example. When viewed as offline files the browser bar look kinda like this:
And BOOM! You have all of your files for free! Even if you made a mistake and went with a proprietary vendor a while back. You CAN get your files.
Bonus round for the uber geeks. If you want to make and build wget on your mac yourself you can use these lines of code (check for newer versions as this blog post ages of course):
cd ~/Downloads/
curl -O http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/wget/wget-1.15.tar.gz
tar -zxvf wget-1.15.tar.gz
cd wget-1.15/
./configure --with-ssl=openssl
make
sudo make install
rm -rf wget-1.15
rm wget-1.15.tar.gz
Thanks and let’s hear it for Open Source Software like Tendenci. And here’s to open source software like “wget” that allows you to get a static copy of your site even from proprietary vendors and their long contracts. Freedom is good.
Lastly a few (some paid) alternatives to download your site:
Frequently I stumble when trying to explain Tendenci is as simple as possible, yet still quite complex. I shouldn’t apologize because people are complex. People > Web 2.0. I mean seriously, step back and look at Amazon or Facebook. (hint: they are complex as all get out.)
How can you make software to serve humans and pretend they are simple creatures when they aren’t! Thus I frequently find myself quoting someone a lot smarter:
“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Albert Einstein
Which according to wikipedia is an abbreviated version of this quote:
“…the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.” – Albert Einstein
Which leads me to this great presentation on group dynamics.
If you are involved in NPOs and non-profits and use Tendenci, then it is what you already know; groups of people are complex. You can’t tell a hundred year old organization to simplify, you must instead make software that meets their needs. Because people come first. It’s about legacy.
Group Dynamics Slideshare by Swati Gautam found via Googling and enjoyed via reading.
“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.
