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Friends,

If you’re attending the Web 2.0 Expo in NYC next week, stop by our booth in the Non-Profit Pavilion and say Hi!

We’re grateful to the Web 2.0 Expo NY folks for generously donating this booth space to us and looking forward to telling conference attendees more about DonorsChoose.org.

We’ll have staff at the booth all day Wed 9/17 and Thu 9/18, but if you want to make sure you connect with us while you’re attending the conference, just drop us an email…

* erica (at) donorschoose (dot) org for Marketing or Business Development stuff
* oliver (at) donorschoose (dot) org for Technology stuff

Hope to see you there,
Oliver

P.S. In the interest of full disclosure, I’m on the advisory board for the Web 2.0 Expo NY.  :)

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Using our “website widget” is probably the best option if you want to list classroom projects on your website, but you’re not a web developer comfortable using our classroom projects API.

Follow these simple steps to add classroom projects to your website!

1. Start at DonorsChoose.org advanced search and specify what type of projects you want to appear on your site:
* Execute your advanced search and on the bottom of the search results, choose the “Website widget” option from the “Add to your website or feed reader” menu.
* You will be transferred over to the SpringWidgets website.

2. Customize your classroom projects “widget” on the SpringWidgets website:
* Under “Step 1 Customize This Widget” take these (recommended, but not required) steps to prepare your widget:
** “Set widget embed size:” to 340 x 390
** Set “Border Color” to white (#FFFFFF). which is on the 2nd row of the palette, 3rd column from the right
** Paste this URL into the “Link to image” box: http://www.donorschoose.org/images/logo_trans.gif

* Under “Step 2 Get The Widget Code!” get the HTML code snippet of the widget you’ve created by following the instructions to “Copy the code–Click below & press Ctrl+C”
** To save or test your widget, paste the HTML code snippet into a text editor (such as Notepad), save the file with a “.html” extension, and then open the file in your web browser.

3. Add the classroom projects widget to your website by pasting the HTML code snippet into the code behind your website.

Our thanks to SpringWidgets for making this possible!

Oliver

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We recently enabled prospective donors to be notified of projects matching their interests via an RSS feed. This will be most useful to folks with feed readers (eg. Bloglines, Google Reader) or “personalized homepages” (eg. MyYahoo, MyMSN).

We also have been getting requests to enable feeds of public school classroom projects to appear on other people’s public websites. The teachers using DonorsChoose.org are fortunate to have such enthusiastic supporters, people willing to help us spread the word about the thousands of great classroom projects in need of funding.

We’re excited to announce that for these generous DonorsChoose.org “evangelists,” we have built a project feed API!

Our hope is that savvy web developers will use this simple JSON API to show classroom project listings on their websites. For example, a school or school district could show all their teachers’ classroom projects on their public website. Or a company could publish listings of classroom projects in their community on their corporate giving intranet.

In addition, the API could enable web developers to build novel “widgets” showing project listings matching criteria of their choosing or “mash-ups” that combine project listings with other web resources. For example, a Facebook widget could list classroom projects of personal interest to that Facebook user. Or classroom projects could be mashed-up with Google Maps to provide a map-based project browsing interface.

Techies should peruse our Developer Guide for more information. You can also email us with any questions: apiquestion (at) donorschoose (dot) org.

If you’re not a techie yourself, you can help our teachers by telling your favorite web developer to try adding some project listings to their website!

Oliver

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The DonorsChoose.org team is looking for a few more top contributors who would enjoy making a big social impact with a small, fast-moving org!

Do you know someone who wants to apply their private-sector skills to make a more direct philanthropic impact…or has been itching to live in New York City…or is passionate about improving K-12 education?

Help us grow our great team by spreading the word about these opportunities:

* Software Engineer

Pls forward the job descriptions linked above to anyone you know who might be a good fit. Don’t hesitate to put any interested folks in touch with me directly via email: I’m oliver (at) donorschoose (dot) org.

Updated 1/31/08: Removed two filled positions and changed links from LinkedIn to DonorsChoose.org

Updated 4/14/08: Removed another filled position and refreshed job descriptions.

Updated 6/2/08: Removed another filled position (QA Automation Engineer).

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Is it possible to have too much of a good thing?

I’m not sure, but perhaps the answer is “Yes” when we’re talking about DonorsChoose.org web traffic and The Colbert Report!

We worked hard to prepare our site infrastructure to handle the increased attention of the Blogger Challenge that started on October 1. The Blogger Challenge got off to a roaring start and we’ve been amazed and humbled throughout by the incredible support of the blogosphere, which has come together to provide so many students with access to the classroom resources they need to learn.

For the first 2.5 weeks of October, we were gracefully handling many new site visitors, lots of donations, and tons of views of our challenge thermometer “widgets” (which are being featured on some of the web’s highest-trafficked blogs).

But our site was flat-out overwhelmed by the massive traffic that resulted from Stephen Colbert and Craig Newmark’s announcement around midnight on Thursday, October 18.

As we scrambled to increase capacity, we continued to receive big spikes in web traffic from the re-airings of that Colbert show on Friday, October 19 in the morning, afternoon, and early evening, and across US time zones.

Since no new Colbert episodes were airing last week (October 22-26), Comedy Central re-ran the previous week’s episodes! These additional re-airings generated many more big spikes in web traffic, mostly in the 24 hours starting on last Wednesday at midnight: between daily re-airings and the staggered showings across time zones, we think the Colbert show that introduced DonorsChoose.org may have aired between 3 - 9 times during that 24 hour period. Amazing.

This was GREAT news for the teachers who use DonorsChoose.org to get much-needed resources for their classrooms. But not so great for our web servers.

The DonorsChoose.org tech team has been working like crazy to handle this huge increase in web traffic. For example, if our servers are temporarily overwhelmed, the site will now remain available but show a “Sorry!” message if users try to make donations or post new projects. We are also caching the site much more aggressively.

However, yesterday one of our changes to increase server capacity didn’t sit well. The result was the inconsistent availability of DonorsChoose.org from 8:45pm ET yesterday evening - 9:30am ET this morning. (We thought we had the problem licked at around 1am ET and called it a night, only to find out that our fix didn’t stick.)

We have since stabilized the site, are monitoring it carefully, and quickly making improvements behind the scenes.

All of us at DonorsChoose.org are deeply appreciative of your patience while we beef-up our site to smoothly handle all this great attention!

Oliver
CTO, DonorsChoose.org

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