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Benj and Jessica launched a nonprofit. Follow our journey as we built a 501(c)(3) and a web site, and now usher in an endless stream of worthy charity nominees and monthly grant winners!

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On the Road Again

vacation

I'll be on the road for the next five weeks. First a couple of weeks in Seattle and London visiting dear friends and family, then three weeks in Massachusetts prepping our old house for sale. My Boston to Portland flight on Tuesday was the first since... August?! I used to fly at least monthly. It was good to be back up in the friendly skies after six months on the ground!

On my way up the east coast, before dropping off my car with Dad & Maryann near Logan Airport, I spent a day in New York City snowed in with my cousin-in-law, Hillary. We had an insightful and timely conversation about the next phase of Charitocracy development: cause nomination, discussion, and voting. It's just what I needed to psych myself up for tackling this next and most critical aspect of Charitocracy functionality.

Hillary also suggested including a portal for non-profit nominees to join the discussion without being donors themselves. Brilliant. This way they can correct any well-intentioned but inaccurate information in the nomination pitch, provide more details about their mission and current activities, and respond to any criticism. Hopefully it keeps a grass roots feel without too much of a polished marketing department aftertaste. But it will certainly add an important voice to the discourse.

I'll be constantly on the move until March 1st without much opportunity to code, but I am looking forward to killing off the last few known bugs in the signup/donation process so I can start in earnest on nominations. I'm as excited as ever, but will use this self-imposed downtime to reflect on what's coming next. For now, it's Adventure Time with my buddy Kerry and his fam!

Adventure Time

Beta Tests and Mondays…

Mondays

... always get me down. Well not really, but it's not that exciting either.

Benj has been pulling all-nighters this week developing the sign-up section of the website. (In related news, I've been sleeping quite well since no one is breathing in the same room as me. Oh, did you hear that pin drop in London? Me, too!)

So, I spent a chunk of today beta testing this bit. I tried like hell to break the thing, but Benj did a fist pump when I told him that I couldn't. Don't worry, I didn't let him get away without taking my list of suggestions for improvement.

The best part, though, was creating accounts for all these "people" signing up. I might have used your face and assigned you an amazing superlative. So, if you need ideas when this thing goes live, let me know.

As for me, I shall henceforth be referred to by my Charitocracy Username. And since it's Monday, I'm totally okay with that.

Signed,

World's Okayest Wife

Puppy Monkey Baby

Let’s Encrypt!

Keymaster

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!

Making