Category: General News

This has been an amazingly productive week. Less sleep, more dark chocolate, you know the drill. But I've also been propelled by all the Hamilton stuck in my head. Maybe you've heard of it? I hadn't when I was introduced to Kurt Crowley, Hamilton’s associate music director, conductor, and keyboardist on the set of our mutual friend's indie film last summer. "Never heard of it," I proclaimed. Glad to hear it's finally just starting to catch on now.

After first tackling registration and donation, then cause nominations, and most recently the discussion forum, I've finally now moved on to perhaps the site's most important component: voting! With "The Election of 1800" ringing in my ears, I embed democracy inside Charitocracy. No matter how much you donate, each donor gets one vote. You can, however, spread your 1 vote across up to 5 causes if you like, each getting a fraction which you can adjust. And then in addition to voting, you can also "like" as many causes as you want, giving them greater visibility to other donors. (Our founding fathers would have added a Like button, too, but they were still using paper ballots back then. How archaic!)

I hope to complete this last major component within a few weeks so I can open up the site to beta testers in time for a mock election at the end of June. If that goes well then I'll push to go live for real paying donors as early as July!

I want to give a shout out to another nonprofit this week, TechSoup.

"TechSoup equips changemakers with transformative technology solutions and skills they need to improve lives globally and locally."

Jessica and I met with our accountant recently who advised us to use QuickBooks to manage Charitocracy's accounts. No big surprise there. Jessica thought we could get the cheapest version of QuickBooks Online for $120/year by having them extend their introductory $10/month rate beyond the initial 6 month period. But then I discovered TechSoup's offering.

After confirming our 501(c)(3) status, we qualified for a donation of QuickBooks Online Plus, which normally costs $40/month and is often discounted to $24/month. We only had to pay TechSoup's administrative fee of $50. And we'll be able to renew for another $50 in future years. This is a big savings if you compare it to the $288 we'd pay for this "plus" edition or $120 for the cheapest one!

Thank you, TechSoup. It was a painless process to register for this donation. And thanks to Intuit, maker of QuickBooks, for donating their software through TechSoup!

This week I pulled my first all-day-all-night-all-dayer for Charitocracy, and probably the first of my entire career! In the past I've always gone home and slept after an all-nighter. Have I mentioned how much I love working on this stuff?

What was I working on that's so engrossing I just couldn't stop? I was migrating Charitocracy's staging server off my laptop onto a virtual private server (VPS) "droplet" at one of DigitalOcean's NYC data centers.

Here's a brief rundown of my long, long day:

• Signed up using $10 off discount code I saw on Facebook, effectively giving me a nice long free trial. You can support Charitocracy by using our referral URL to sign yourself up. You get $10 off (e.g. 2 months of their cheapest config) and Charitocracy gets $25 off our future bills!
• After researching Linux distribution options, chose Ubuntu 16.04, the new long-term support (LTS) version.
• Ran through the checklists for setting up and securing the system, installing Apache, MySQL, and PHP. This gave me a LAMP environment very similar to the MAMP environment I've been using, just on Linux instead of Mac.
• Installed Let's Encrypt (remember?) along with a cronjob to automatically renew the TLS certificate as needed.
• Dumped the MySQL database from my MacBook to a file, copied it over to the new server, and imported it to the new database.
• Moved my git origin repository from iCloud to DropBox so it could be easily accessed not only from my Macs but also from Linux. Cloned the repository into the new server's Apache tree and took it for a spin!
• Blinked a lot for a good hour or so.
• Configured postfix email server like I had it on my Mac, using Gmail SMTP servers to send out emails from Charitocracy.
• Discovered that I was hitting the RAM ceiling on the cheapest ($5/mo 512 MB) DigitalOcean config, leading to some MySQL queries failing, so resized my droplet to the $10/mo 1 GB config. I'm sure I'll quickly outgrow this one, too, but so far so good!

I can still easily sync the latest code and database back onto my Mac and fly it via PageKite if I have a need, but I don't foresee any. I've effectively obsoleted the local environment I set up 6 weeks ago, but really I've leveraged almost all of it, simply on a remote Linux server that's closer to the final production environment.

Progress! And finally, sleep!