Category: General News

This week I'm hoping to complete a critical component of the Charitocracy web site: donor signup & billing. The goal is to make it super quick and convenient for a new donor visiting the site to sign up and commence annual credit card donations of $13/year (or more if desired). Super quick, convenient, and secure!

Toward that goal, the main accomplishment I want to highlight has been adoption of secure communications (HTTPS protocol) for ch-y.org at no cost to us. I'm running this blog on a hosted server without any extra security, but the main charitocracy domain, aka my 2009 Mac Mini sitting here on my desk, is now running HTTP over TLS with a certificate signed by Let's Encrypt.

Usually this is roughly a $100/year expenditure. You pay a 3rd-party company to check that you control the domain of interest, and they generate you a TLS (successor to SSL if you've heard of that) security certificate which you install on your server. If configured correctly, all data transmitted between your web site and your visitors will be encrypted so bad guys snooping the network traffic only see gibberish, whether it be credit card details or other private information. You'll know it's working because there will be a little padlock symbol next to the domain name at the top of your browser.

The beauty of Let's Encrypt, a relatively new non-profit organization themselves, is that they're helping make the web more secure by encouraging and empowering everyone with a website to self-prove their domain ownership and generate their own certificates all for free using a tool they've created and maintain. I secured ch-y.org and saved Charitocracy a hundred bucks a year all while binge-watching Making a Murderer from the comfort of my living room couch. Feel free to hop over to ch-y.org to admire our padlock. Thanks, Let's Encrypt!

I've officially pulled my first Charitocracy all-nighter! It's now 6:30am, so I'll keep this brief. But here are a few of the (debatably) exciting things I've done since last week:

• Applied for and was granted business checking and savings accounts at DCU, the credit union I've used since my first job at DEC in the mid-90s.

• Set up accounts at PayPal and Braintree (credit cards), the combination of which I intend to use for donation processing. Maybe I'll integrate Amazon, too, but I haven't decided yet. Braintree credit card entry will let us take credit card info without donors leaving our site, except that the text fields into which you type your numbers are actually little frames hosted at Braintree, covering most of the PCI security concerns: we won't see or store any sensitive data ourselves. I'm hoping that once Braintree is fully integrated into new parent company PayPal, they'll also offer PayPal's 0.7% nonprofit discount on transaction fees.

• Brought my 2009 Mac Mini back to life after blunt force trauma sidelined it during our most recent New England to North Carolina migration in August. I managed to get its original hard disk back up and running, and it survived zeroing the whole disk, upgrading from Snow Leopard to El Capitan, and even full disk encryption. But if it fails, I have a new 9.5mm 1TB fusion drive ready to install.

• Installed MAMP and other goodies on Mac Mini to serve as a staging... server. Interestingly, I lost a couple hours getting outgoing email (postfix) working. Well, it works now.  And I concede "interestingly" is a bit of a stretch.

• To put icing on my all-nighter cake, compiled the first draft of our privacy policy and terms and conditions, required by Braintree.  I'm... falling asleep here... just remembering the privacy policy and... terms and conditions...

ZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz

There are a lot of words that have been used to describe me. Some not fit for print, I'm sure. But some others include Type A, extrovert, control-freak, and most definitely bossy. And you know what? I'm okay with those things. Probably because they are all true.

There has been a crusade against the word bossy lately. And I get it. A boy asserts himself and he's a leader. A girl does it and she's bossy. As a mom to a creative and bright girl, I find myself worrying when she seems to always be towing the line between leader and dictator. But what about if you're the boss? Does the boss ever get to be bossy?

Well, I'll be the first to tell you that I don't want a boss. No one is the boss of me. Or so I thought...

Let me back this up a bit. For more than 7 years, Benj traveled for work. It started out at a week every 2 months. Then every 6 weeks, then every month. Throw in extra conferences, worldwide meetings, and events, and before I knew it, it was not uncommon for him to be gone 1-3 (or even 4!) weeks a month. For those of you keeping score at home, I was basically home alone with our kids 50% of the time. It doesn't work for everyone, but it seemed to work for us.

Little did I know that my life was about to change. Dramatically. Benj decided to take a year leave of absence from his job (commonly referred to as The Year of Benj™ around here) and be home. All the time. I will admit that I was nervous about this transition. Could we all survive being together all day, every day? I'm pleased to report that we've made it nearly 3 months and we're all still alive. Benj is happier, the kids are glad that Dad is around more, and I finally feel like I have a parenting partner and present husband.

And you think that would be enough for Benj. But no. He had to go and rope me into this little dream of his. Sure he calls me the CEO and President. But that's just for my ego. Let's get real. He's calling the shots around here and it ain't easy for me. You try going from having a half-time husband to one who's your boss! Let me tell you, there is nothing hotter than waking up to your husband boss whispering sweet nothings like, "Hey, how are those bylaws coming along?"

Thankfully, he's not as bossy as I am.