Technology
The Prison Policy Initiative has a small effort underway to help prison reformers use the web more efficiently.
Updating your website isn't as hard as you think. We're recommending that organizations install Newspro or Coranto.
[September 2002 update: So much for this advice. The developer, Elvii, disappeared and his website is offline. He(?) left a note that said "This site is temporarily unavailable. Please check back in a few weeks. Though software development will not continue, existing software will be made available under an open-source license in the future." Months, not weeks, pass in silence. One group has arisen to continue development: http://coranto.gweilo.org/ Unfortunately, these enthusiasts who have taken over development don't take the same pains the developer did in making things easy for you. I mean heck, half the value of Newspro/Coranto was that the software basically installed itself. (For folks unfamiliar with webservers, that is a serious accomplishment.) Thankfully somebody has a partial mirror of the original developer websites for Coranto and the precursor to the software: Newspro with the original easy-to-find links to the software and the clear instructions. With the long term future of the package in question, we can't whole-heartedly recommend it. On the other hand, the only viable alternative is the super-simple like blogger or the super complicated like slashcode. With this in mind, the software is still the best for what it does.]
[October 2002 update: After thinking about it, blogger.com might not be a bad way to go. What I don't like about blogger is that that the data is on their server, as is the program. That makes me uncomfortable. While this stuff can be complicated to fix when it breaks, I know that -- as long as I control the entire operation -- if I can't fix it myself I can always pay somebody to do it for me. If blogger has problems -- or worse were to go suddenly bankrupt -- no reasonable amount of time or money could put me back in control. That said, if the choices were between doing this by hand, and blogger.com; even I knew blogger was going bankrupt next week (and I have no evidence to suggest that) you would still be better served to have used some content management system than doing it by hand. If you go with blogger, I strongly suggest A) buying the pro version rather than the free version. That gives you some more flexibility and you can then post up to 100k a month. If you need to do a more than that -- which is a lot -- it gets expensive quick though.
Personally, I'd love to see a desktop program to duplicate blogger's functionality of accepting entries, formatting the entry and the archives, and then ftping the result. I'd be willing to live without easy group collaboration features if I knew that my data was in my own control and that I could post as much as I wanted. Such a program could take the blogging idea into a much more sophisticated content management system. If anything you know of does this, please drop us a line so we can promote it here.]
[November 2002 update: Blogger had a problem this month where somebody hacked in, and was able to make changes on member sites. Blogger took action and fixed the problem in under a day, but this does illustrate a weakness of the all-eggs-in-the-same-database model. Nothing in the above recommendation really changes, though.]
| Huh? Here's a more accessible version of the most important portions of this page, from a proposal sent to a leading Criminal Justice organization: In my experience, I've found that non-profits rarely change most of their "general" pages, but want to frequently add news blurbs to the front of their site, as well as links to other relevant resources as they are discovered. The problem is that doing this is typically a pain so it never gets done, which is sad as it's the little changes that get people to come back. If these two important parts of the website can be made easy to update, any approved member of the organization can add content to the site whenever they have the desire. I recently found two pieces of software that allow any authorized person to add news items or links without needing any technical training. One, called Links 2.0, allows you to control a list of links, and it allows users to suggest links for approval by the administrator. No coding or uploading required as the program is controlled via a web browser. The second is Coranto, or any one of the "blog" packages that allow you to post new items to the site. No HTML knowledge is required. Coranto is not much harder to operate than using the google site. The site news on prisonsucks.com and the visitor links are set up to run this way; I'm a technical guy, but if it wasn't super easy to operate, I wouldn't be able to keep up. If any of this would be of assistance -- or if you would like to see a demo of how this works in practice from the admin side -- just let me know. |
Coranto is a CGI/Perl script used to update a news page on a Web site. Some of its features include:
NewsPro is a CGI/Perl script used to update a news page on a Web site. Some of its features include:
- Easy install & configuration (done via the Web).
- Supports multiple users and secure login via "cookies".
- Easy to change the way your news looks, via a web-based configuration form.
- News is written to a text file, instead of generated dynamically; safer and more secure
- Ability to quickly remove or edit previously posted news. Optionally users can only have permission to remove/edit their own posts.
- Auto-deletion of old news (optional)
- Auto-archiving of old news (optional; either in a single file or monthly archives)
- Built-in e-mail news list functionality.
- Includes full online help.
- Display a list of new or recently modified pages on your site along with your news.
- Users can search through news (kinda; this worked in last version called Newspro and should in this version soon.)
- Optionally show users only news posted since their last visit.
- Possible to add your own news fields fairly easily.
- Simple interface
To backup our assertion that this software is easy enough to use that you will update your site more often, we're willing to install the software into the existing website of any 501(c)(3) prison reform non-profit. We'll also explain how to use it. If you do not yet have a website or need more advanced customization, we can refer you to private designers.