Using the Event Calendar

As you may have noticed, there has been a little event calendar on the site for the last few weeks. We’ve been ironing out some issues and there are still other elements that we may add in the future, but it is ready for folks to start making use of.

  1. To post to the calendar you must be registered as a blogger on the site. We are limiting who can post to the calendar to prevent spam from ending up on the calendar.
  2. If you want to post to the calendar, please ask Glit, Penguin, or Creech (me!) to set you up.
  3. If you want to book space in one of the sims, please see Penguin or Glit and ask one of them to make the arrangements.
  4. This goes without saying, but please be sensible about what events you post.

Alright, how do you go about posting an event? It is pretty simple.

  1. Log into the NPC site.
  2. Click on "Create Content" in your right hand menu
  3. Click on "Event"
  4. Choose a start and end date along with times. Please note that the time zone is Pacific/SL.
  5. Type in a Title
  6. Add body–you can use some HTML. If you want to see what the filter will accept and what options you have–click on "Input Format"
  7. You may include a file attachment if you have something like a flyer
  8. Click "Preview" if you’d like to look at your event before you post it
  9. Click "Submit" when you are ready for it to be posted to the site.

It is that easy. Happy event posting!

Creech Antwerp/Matthew Saunders

Written by: Creech

Event Calendar

You may have noticed that there is now an event calendar on the site.  There is a tab at the top of the site that will lead you to the calendar.  The idea is to provide a place where we can all see what events are happening in the sims and when.  With any luck, it will help the NPC managers book events in an intelligent way.
If you want to make use of one of the public spaces or are going to have an event in your own space–please contact Penguin (Megan) to make arrangements for booking/listing.
Thanks!Creech (Matthew)

Written by: Creech

The NPSL Management Team’s Meeting

Well, a group of us met today by phone call. There are a few things I took away from today’s meeting.

1) Please, if you want to blog here (even if you have your own blog and want to cross post from there), let me know. Email matthew at dogstar.org and let me know your NPSL username and who you are in the nonprofit commons. I’ll set you up. The more bloggers we have, the better.

2) We still have a ton of volunteer roles available. If you have interest in helping out, check out the NPSL wiki at: http://npsl.wikispaces.com/volunteer_roles and find something you like. Remember, this place is being provided for our use for free.

3) Remember to promote our official launch day! It is on Tuesday, August 14, 2007 at 5:30 p.m. PT/SLT.

I’m really excited by the progress made in tons of our tenant offices. The different decor is well worth traveling around and checking out.

Thanks for your participation and I’m looking forward to seeing you inworld!

Creech/Matthew.

Written by: Creech

More on Uptime and Nonprofits

Greg left a note mentioning the free monitoring service, Monastic. It doesn't have as much functionality as SiteUpTime.com, but you can monitor 100 sites. If all you are doing is trying to track when your site(s) are down then it seems like this might be a better solution than SiteUpTime. So, as an experiment I have both monitoring systems monitoring the Tech Soup in Second Life site. If I have any revelations, I'll share.

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Written by: Creech

Uptime and Nonprofits

Recently I had an Skype message from Susan, our "nonprofit administrator herder" for the Nonprofits in Second Life project. I have to assume that she was posting to the site, or perhaps reading some recent content. In any case, she IMed me because the site was down. I'm acting as the Web master, so this made good sense. I probed a little bit and came to the conclusion that the server was completely unresponsive.

I sent a quick note to our very good friends at Social*Signal who have generously donated the server space. It turned out that it was a system-wide issue with the hosting company that they work with.

So how can a nonprofit track uptime/downtime of sites they run? Obviously you can't sit and watch your site all the time. You can use software that sends a request to your server every so often and the software waits for a response from the server–no response means the site is probably down. If you don't have the skill set to set up this kind of monitoring software, there is a free or nearly free solution out there–http://www.siteuptime.com. It takes five minutes to set up and it will start monitoring your site immediately. If you only have one site to monitor, it is free. Three sites cost $5/month. Six sites cost $10/month.

Site uptime is now enabled for the NPSL site. I get an email when the site goes down, when it comes back up, and a report each month on how much time was offline.

Written by: Creech