Every day, from my hotel room in Abuja, I read about President Jonathan campaigning across the country pledging free and fair elections while refugees headed East towards Nigeria, and though I knew they weren’t coming to Nigeria, it felt as though movements throughout Africa were spreading towards my very location. Revolutions and wars were erupting all around me.

Meanwhile, I worked on drafting Facebook posts and tweets, researched and attempted to organize a donation campaign, helped launch a campaign website, and sat at the bar and drank beers with other hotel dwellers from all over the world. In Nigeria.

It was surreal.

Web of Change may sound cheesy to some who watch the flood of tweets or Facebook posts as we return, or read about how we all feel inspired to change the world. I’ll be honest: I don’t think I can change the world. From Nigeria, I saw how absolutely out of control the world is and I felt how close that was to me at that moment. All of Nigeria watched it too, and in traveling with campaign staff the conversation never ceased to focus on politics and the future of their country and of the world.

I returned home a month later to conversations about how ridiculous it is that gas prices are so high, knowing that the average daily income for a Nigerian is around $2 – less than a large cup of coffee at Dunkin Donuts. And yet, just as I had adjusted to Nigeria, I adjusted back to living in my world. But really, the latter wasn’t that difficult.

I know where I am and who I am. I am aware that change is hard, and sometimes impossible. My goal is not to change the world. My world, in all reality, is pretty great. I think my goal is simply to help other people get the lives they deserve. Justice, I suppose. But it’s more than that: human rights. Egypt and Libya happened because people were fed up with their government and with the way they were forced to live their lives, and they chose to make a change. Sure, it’s all a big mess now, but they did it – they actually did it. Gaddafi has presumably fled Libya (or is at least in hiding), and Egypt is forming a new government.

Two of the sessions I attended at Web of Change were about storytelling – the power of storytelling and the effect they can have on the movements we are trying to create. Jonah Sachs is set to publish book about the subject and talked to us about how to tell a powerful story. As he spoke, my first thought was that he would be a fantastic literature professor. While I understand the practical application a story has in online organizing, advocacy, and movement building, in a refreshing way the sessions felt like a writing class. He referenced myths, and how they are the foundation for many societies, and further how they have driven the human race forward. There is a certain structure to an effective story, to the myths that act as a foundation for our society. There is a method that works, and when that method is applied, a story can inspire people to take action. The detailed breakdown of a story into such seemingly obvious pieces struck me as being incredibly parallel to the way events in our society naturally occur.

Sachs says, “brands which tell values-driven stories through the right channels will not only revolutionize marketing, they may become humanity’s greatest hope for the future.” I think he he would agree with me that this is also true of society and of the human race in general – values-driven stories told through the right channels will inevitably be (and have been) how our society evolves, and how revolutions emerge.

Before Egypt, my generation had never seen a government truly uprooted because of protest. Think about it: the protests in Egypt actually changed an entire country. I barely remember the fall of the Berlin wall – I was six years old. But the story of the fall of the Berlin wall has continued to be told and has acted as inspiration for similar acts of rebellion. The story of Egypt’s revolution was not crafted by a writer. It wasn’t carefully constructed using the elements Jonah outlined in his sessions, but the story – the “Tahrir moment” – certainly contains those same elements. And it has inspired many in other countries to do the same. I think it has also sparked something in people my age in the United States and elsewhere to think about what we can do in our own worlds. Just take a look at Occupy Wall Street. Will it work? Maybe. Is it admirable? Sure. Was it inspired by a great story? Definitely.

As Gideon Rosenblatt wrote yesterday, “What we are seeing in Occupy Wall Street and related events around the country is our youth, at least some small segment of it, telling us that everything is not alright.” The interesting thing about Occupy Wall Street and other similar events is that there is this constant attempt to replicate a story that unfolded under entirely different circumstances. We do this all the time, but New York City is not Egypt. Our government, while it may be flawed, is not a dictatorship. Vietnam and Iraq are completely different wars, opposed or supported by generations that could not be more different. We would like parts of our world to change, but each story has to be different and we have to approach it in a different way. We can learn from each others stories, but attempting to replicate Egypt might be comparable to attempting to replicate any great novel. It’s just not possible. What is possible is to read all the time, study these inspiring stories, and break them down as Jonah did. There are people doing this, but I still think we need to focus on understanding that peaceful protest doesn’t always work. In fact, it rarely works. Most of us who attended Web of Change do not live in a world where we quite literally have to pick up a gun to protect our rights. We have rights. I think this fact alone is what makes it so difficult for us to figure out how to reach our goals.

Web of Change is a space for people to think and talk about these kinds of things. For some, it’s about how they might alter or improve the state of our oceans – prevent the trade of shark fins, or oil spills. For others, it’s trying to prevent an innocent man from being executed, and ultimately changing our flawed criminal justice system. And it’s about figuring out how we get there. For a few days 100 or so people got together and talked about the tactics we all use on a regular basis, and tried to determine not only how they relate to our campaigns, but the part they play in whatever change it is we want to make – the story we’d like to tell. Those who have been successful in doing what they want to do, and doing it well, helped teach us all how to do the same. We dove down pretty deep into specific tactics and campaigns (which I’ll write about in future blog posts), but we also talked broadly outside of the session space about where we came from, our families, and our own stories that had driven us to where we are today.

I met an incredible group of people at this conference, and while I don’t think I identify specifically with a campaign or movement just yet (and maybe I never will) I did come out of the conference understanding a bit more about what I want to do. How I want to do it isn’t clear yet, but wanting to make change, while it sounds cheesy, is actually what most of us want to do whether on a grand or minuscule scale. If you’re a writer, you want your words to inspire reflection on our own lives or our society’s choices. Teachers want to impact the future by helping shape young minds. Some of us just want to earn a paycheck, but even that is an effort to provide for ourselves or our families – changing from not eating, to eating. Sending the first person from your family to college. Uprooting a military dictator.

We all want to be a part of a great story.

How much did your elementary education cost? The clever folks at Building Tomorrow have found a great way to use that simple question to drive an innovative campaign that connects the costs of a primary school education in the United States to the work they do building schools in Uganda.

I first learned about the campaign through a friend’s Tweet, and followed the link thinking that I would learn just how ridiculously expensive education is in our country, and maybe be encouraged to donate money towards schools that need help in the United States. Much to my surprise, after answering two easy questions, I was brought to this page:

Inspired by their simple-yet-effective calculator app, I called up Maggie Kirkpatrick, Assistant Director at Building Tomorrow, to learn more about it.

The Organization
Founded in 2005, Building Tomorrow is a surprisingly small organization, consisting of only three people (yes, you read correctly). In spite of their small size, they have helped build seven schools in Uganda, and are in the process of building another three. All of their schools are, ultimately, public government schools. Building Tomorrow provides the infrastructure for the schools, and partners with local ministries of education who provide the teachers. The idea is, once Building Tomorrow leaves the area, the schools can still function at full speed. The schools are all primary, P1-P7 (equivalent to our elementary schools) and can host up to 325 kids per school. They focus mainly in rural Uganda, because, well, it’s where they have personal contacts and the rural areas are where the highest population of kids reside, with the least amount of access to schools.

Campaign Messaging and Strategy
I asked Maggie if they had implemented any specific kind of outreach campaign for the calculator, or if most of the publicity had happened organically. She said it was a combination: the outreach team consists of only 2 people. They spent a significant amount of time emailing blogs and news outlets, doing research to find out who might be interested in promotion, and doing their best to email people they thought might be willing to help. But, for the most part, it has spread organically via social networks.

The messaging, as Maggie put it, was “very deliberate. The only way people are going to buy in is if we don’t spam them with messaging,” and I argue it’s the messaging that made this campaign successful. It’s the reason I clicked on the link and followed through. Maggie made another point I thought was interesting: this campaign messaging won’t ever be out of date. It’s always relevant, it’s always going to be interesting to see how expensive your education was and how you might be able to contribute to someone else’s.

The key contributors to this campaign are young people in the United States. High school and college kids take the brunt of the workload in spreading the word and fundraising. Building Tomorrow takes the money they have raised and creates “challenge grants” in Uganda, proposing to local communities that the organization will fund the school if the community puts in the legwork. What results is a community effort to literally lay the brick for their schools, while the bricks are provided by Building Tomorrow. Schools are built by family members – grandmothers, fathers, sisters – and local community members.

Building Tomorrow currently has over 20 college chapters, all working to fundraise for schools in rural Uganda. In addition, they have a partnership with Key Club International. 100% of the money raised goes directly towards construction of the schools, and as Maggie said, “We work hard to make that a commitment.”

Finally, they have donors and do some grant writing that helps fund operating cost for the organization, but my guess is the operating cost is low given they are currently only a three-person company.

Tools and Technology
Clearly there is a technical aspect to this campaign in addition to the deliberate online strategy. Some resources that Building Tomorrow used included working with sparked.com to get tips on how to build an accurate calculator. The technology behind the calculator is relatively simple, and uses data from the National Center for Education. The calculator uses no more than some basic html and a “digital excel spreadsheet.” I wonder about the sustainability of such a simple system. The calculateit.org app itself is built on software provided by Exact Target, who also help with email campaign management, and hosts microsites and landing pages.

Statistics
The calculator has been loaded just about 2,000 times since it launched 2 weeks ago. Most donations are coming from first-time visitors to the site.

When I first clicked through to the Building Tomorrow website, it’s because, to put it simply, I was intrigued. To me, this was already a successful campaign having fit a few basic criteria:

1. I found out about it organically, not via an email list or advertisement. I heard about it from a friend.
2. I was intrigued, and not by the actual intent of the campaign, but by a very clever hook, and I participated as a result.
3. I told my friends about it. I’m blogging about it.

At the end of the day, it’s not a campaign that has been earth-shattering in terms of numbers – it’s not seeing 100,000 or even 10,000 views every day. But right now, a small 3-person organization that has existed for 6 years has funded the construction of 7 schools in rural Uganda that host a total of 2,275+ children. I think that’s pretty amazing.

• Updating via Drush (with svn)
• Updating via Drush (without svn)
• Updating manually (with svn)
• Updating manually (without svn)
• Updating on your live site

1. Change to the root of your Drupal install
2. Back up your database
3. Run 'drush upc --version-control=svn --svnsync'. 'drush upc' updates all contributed modules, without running update.php OR updating core
4. Update core: run 'drush up'
5. Run 'drush updb' to update your site locally.
6. Test locally before committing to your development site.
7. Add any new files and commit your changes. Use 'svn add --force *' to force the addition of all new files.
8. Use 'svn commit' to commit your changes.
9. Run 'drush updb'
10. Test

1. Back up your database
2. Run 'drush up' or 'drush upc'
3. Run 'drush updb' - this will run update.php

• The 'drush up' command updates modules, core, and runs update.php
• The 'drush upc' command updates modules only, and does not run update.php

1. Back up your database
2. Download the new version of the module from drupal.org
3. 'svn remove' the old module file ('svn rm sites/all/modules/modulefolder')
4. 'svn commit'
5. Extract the new module and place it in sites/all/modules
6. 'svn add' the new module folder
7. 'svn commit'
8. Run update.php. Do this by going to www.yoursite.com/update.php
9. Test, test, test

1. Back up your database
2. Download the new version of the module from drupal.org
3. Delete the old module directory, and replace it with the new downloaded copy
4. Run update.php. Do this by going to www.yoursite.com/update.php
5. Test, test, test

1. Back up your database.
2. Put the site into maintenance mode. You can find that setting at /admin/settings/site-maintenance and select “Off-line.” Customize your offline message as appropriate.
3. Update modules and core (following whatever steps you followed above: drush (with or without svn), svn, or manually).
4. Run update.php. Do this by going to www.yoursite.com/update.php.
5. Test.
6. Take the site out of maintenance mode.
7. Test more.

• Drush: http://drupal.org/project/drush
• Subversion: http://subversion.apache.org/
• Coder: http://drupal.org/project/coder
• Tutorial: http://www.lullabot.com/videos/porting-drupal-modules

I had my new camera for a few days, and took hundreds of pictures. Most of them were out of focus (one of the first things I learned was the difference between “out of focus” and “blurry.”). Many were framed badly. I was mostly taking pictures of people, and was using only half of the frame. The tops of peoples heads were only halfway into the photo. I was using the flash. To sum up: I wasn’t really using my new camera to its full capabilities.

Thankfully, a friend/coworker advised me on a few things, namely: don’t use the flash, frame photos so you’re using the whole frame, learn the rule of thirds, read the manual, Google ISO and aperture and read up on them. Basically, learn something, vs. just shooting pictures randomly. We had an informal photo class at the office with a few other coworkers. It slowly became an obsession.

I actually began learning about ISO and aperture. I gained the confidence to push buttons and use the dials on my camera to test how different settings effected the photos. I learned more and more about what types of photos would look good, vs. not (I finally got past the phase where “every flower I take a picture of will look AMAZING!”).  I actually understood how a shot would look when I took it, vs. waiting to see how it looked in a photo editor. I tested, tested, tested. At one point I ended up with about a hundred pictures of my home-built PC fan whirling around, because I wanted to see how different shutter speed settings produced different effects in the photos.

I was then introduced to Lightroom, and in a few short months, went home for the holidays with a new wide angle lens.

You know that saying, “with great power comes great responsibility”? Since I was now the one with the camera, no one was taking pictures of me (which I prefer). But in taking so many photos, I began to realize that 1. People expect to see the pictures at some point, 2. usually, more than half of the pictures you (read: I) take are crap, and thusly…. 3. you have to spend a good amount of time filtering through photos, deleting, and then editing (and learning how to properly edit photos is as involved a process as learning how to use a good camera).

After a year or so of using the camera, with 3 different lenses, I upgraded to a Canon 7d just last month. The new camera is absolutely amazing, and I’m realizing that I had probably learned all I could learn on the 20d, and it was a good time for an upgrade. Still, I’m now months behind on uploading photos. I still have to go through my pictures from a trip I took to London, Paris and Amsterdam in September. Thanksgiving and Christmas photos are piling up. My hard drive is struggling and I’ve had to invest in a separate drive for storage.

But I’d never go back. I have a new, healthy obsession, and one that allows me to learn something new every day. Being able to capture photos of important people in my life, important moments, even random flowers, trees, animals, insects, clouds, smiles is pretty wonderful.

Did I mention the Legos?

The other day, I learned (somewhat the hard way) about PHP handlers within .htaccess. Essentially, your server can be running a very old version of PHP, and you can override this by adding a line in your .htaccess file (where, among other things, you can also require a username/password for access to your site):

AddHandler php5-script .php

This line forces any .php files in that directory to be executed as PHP5 code. If you’re looking to remove the user/pass from your site, it’s probably a good idea to check out your .htaccess file first, to be sure it’s not including something like the above. If it is, chances are the server is running an old version of PHP, and if you remove/rename .htaccess, your site will most likely throw a PHP error. Fun!

After figuring this out, I did a bit of research into the things you can do with .htaccess. The mod_rewrite plugin lets you redirect URLs without the user knowing. Some servers have this by default, so all you have to put in .htaccess is -

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^old\.html$ new.html

If you WANT your users to know they’re being redirected, you’d add an [R] at the end of your RewriteRule line.

I’m pretty sure I’ll be doing more digging into .htaccess tomorrow.

About a year ago I was playing softball and slid headfirst into home plate. The result was a separated and dislocated shoulder, for which I did not seek medical treatment until the next day. After seeing the doc everything seemed fine I’m sure mostly because of the vicodins, but generally things were fine. I stopped using the sling after a few weeks, and slowly but surely it felt better. My shoulder still hurt, but I figured it was still healing.

A month or two later, it still hurt. Primarily the back of it, near the shoulder blade. It felt like someone was sticking a hot poker into the back of my shoulder, burning whatever muscles it could, followed by random yet sharp, sharp pains. It’s hard for me to remember the precise order of everything that happened in the months after the initial injury, but it felt something like this: doctor, doctor, mri, physical therapy (x2 per week for 8 weeks), doctor, x-ray, mri, doctor, needles, doctor, more needles, more physical therapy, doctor, occupational therapy. And I find myself sitting here, over a year later, in pain.

The initial theory was that I had pinched a nerve in my back or neck. Often, when nerves are pinched in the neck, it can cause symptoms of pain in the neck, shoulder, or even elbow or fingers. Another theory was that I had torn a disc in my neck – this one turned out to be true. I saw a spine specialist who told me the MRI on my neck had indeed shown a torn disc, only slightly, and that some injections would help it heal. It had been unable to heal due to the swelling around it. So, we did the injections. But these are no run of the mill injections. It’s not a cortisone shot. It’s this: Cervical Facet Joint Injection. Fun!

At first I was pretty hopeful and optimistic that we had found the solution (well, that my doctor had found the solution). It did feel better for a while, maybe about a week. It was a lovely week. And then it was back to what I now know as normal. I did a second set of injections for kicks, and after no positive results, was referred to another doctor who basically recommended I do Physical Therapy (again) as well as Occupational Therapy. The theory there was, I spend much of the day in front of a computer, and my posture most likely is just awful. So, I did 12 weeks of PT and OT, twice a week.

I sit here today, still in pain. It’s definitely not as bad as it was a year ago. I know that for sure, and I’m grateful of that because it was really, really bad. But on occasion it’s still too painful for me to even sit still.

I’m writing this mostly because I feel like I have nothing else to write about, but also because there’s a small part of me that hopes a doctor is reading this somewhere and thinking “I know EXACTLY what she needs to fix her shoulder forever.”

Please?

On Saturday I wrote about the admin menu I found for WordPress called Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu. When I emailed the tech team at work, I got a response from Jenn:

Viper’s admin bar embeds in the front end… it works well w/ admin trim interface (remove footer links and ‘howdy’, etc) + cms dashboard (adds big publishing buttons to the dashboard).

The first, Viper’s admin bar, is essentially the same thing as the other admin bar, except it is themed like the same bar on WordPress.com. Very clean, pretty, useful, and you can pick and choose which items you want or don’t want in the bar (the other plugin does not have this option). It also has the option to show on the homepage when you’re logged in, which is pretty much the only thing the other plugin was lacking.

Perhaps most importantly, it lets you set the items for the menu bar per account (per user). I would hope that this is one step closer to settings in plugins having role definitions, i.e. having the admin set the menu bar for admins as a whole, authors, contributors, etc.

What I wish you could do with Viper’s plugin is get rid of the other menu on the left sidebar that is standard for WordPress (though I suppose I could do this manually). This way, we could customize the admin menu for clients more easily, showing them only the pieces they would need to use. The especially important advantage to this is, you would be able to hide the theme editor from those who may inadvertently edit .css or page templates, and thus totally bork the theme. Tip: The settings for this plugin live under Tools, not Settings.

The Admin Trim Interface plugin is also pretty great. This lives under Appearance, and lets you pick and choose which pieces of the admin theme you’d like to have disappear. I think it’s a relatively easy thing to do in the .css, but again, nice to have in a plugin to make the admin section of your site more client friendly.

One thing I haven’t tried yet (also recommended by Jenn) is the WordPress Option Tree (also here). If you’ve ever worked with a Wootheme (this theme is one), they all generally come with built-in theme options. These options are normally something you’d have to know a bit of code, or html, in order to change. The WooThemes menus let you select from a variety of stylesheets (if the theme has them, of course), exclude pages from the navigation, display full content or the excerpt on the homepage, etc.

If you installed all of these plugins, I’m pretty positive you’d have a fully customized, client/kid/adult/internet-dummy/developer friendly admin section of your site.

So in addition to having ShareThis links after each post, I decided to add them to the left sidebar where it lists the date of the post, and comments.

Once you enable ShareThis, and set the links to show up for each post, it automatically grabs the information for that post when you share it. So, if you just copy the code for ShareThis to another place on your site, it won't work, because it's no longer pulling the actual post info: Title, URL, etc.

I fixed this by adding in a few WordPress functions that call for the title and URL of the post. For example, instead of doing this:    <span class='st_facebook' st_title='{TITLE}' st_url='{URL}' ></span> I called for the actual permalink and title of the post. Like so: <span class='st_facebook' st_title='<?php the_title()?>' st_url='<?php the_permalink()?>' ></span>

Seems to me this is a pretty awesome (and super easy) tweak to ShareThis if you don't want it at the end of each post.

Once you enable ShareThis, and set the links to show up for each post, it automatically grabs the information for that post when you share it. So, if you just copy the code for ShareThis to another place on your site, it won’t work, because it’s no longer pulling the actual post info: Title, URL, etc.

I fixed this by adding in a few WordPress functions that call for the title and URL of the post. For example, instead of doing this:

<span class=’st_facebook’ st_title=’{TITLE}’ st_url=’{URL}’ ></span>

I called for the actual permalink and title of the post. Like so:

<span class=’st_facebook’ st_title=’<?php the_title()?>’ st_url=’<?php the_permalink()?>’ ></span>

Seems to me this is a pretty awesome tweak to ShareThis if you don’t want it at the end of each post.

For one, I needed a page that would display posts from my EchoDitto blog and EchoDitto labs blog. I probably over-engineered this (in fact, I know I did), but rather than keep it simple… I downloaded and installed FeedWordpress. This plugin reminds me of Feeds (and Feed Aggregator) for Drupal – it basically does the same thing. I can pull a feed in from anywhere, and it creates posts from that feed as posts on my site. You can see this in action here. I set it up to automatically categorize posts in a certain category, and then created a page template to have it display posts of that category using <?php query_posts(‘category_name=echoditto’); ?>. This is the part I’m sure I over-engineered. There must be an easier way.

In any case…

The second plugin I am using is called Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu. Another comparison: this one is quite like Administration Menu for Drupal. It provides a nice admin menu. It removes the standard sidebar admin menu and instead gives you a horizontal one at the top with dropdowns. You can customize colors, remove the WordPress admin header (as I have done here).

Other than that, the plugins I have installed are relatively standard. I’ve made some theme tweaks (this one is from WooThemes), including adding a “Post a Comment” link in the left sidebar for each post and changing the link colors to NOT be a hideous red (sorry theme developer, I do love the theme though). I still need to fix instances of text running out of appropriate areas (twitter links in the sidebar) and figure out how to actually blog on this thing regularly.

We've seen instances of Twitter getting journalists into trouble, including Octavia Nasr, former correspondent for CNN, who was fired for tweeting that she respected a prominent leader of Hezbollah.

There are quite a few things at play here, but I immediately question The Washington Post's decision to specifically advise its journalists against engaging on Twitter. Just because it's Twitter, does not mean the level of engagement should change. Just because it is the internet, and not TV, does not mean the level of engagement should change. What should change is the kind of engagement, the kind of thinking that goes behind your words.

I think there's a tendency to treat the internet, and Twitter specifically, as a different kind of world from anything else, especially for those who work outside of this industry. Many people still don't understand or even use Twitter. But really, for journalists, how does it differ from any other kind of information dissemination? It shouldn't. The truth is, The Washington Post should not have told its journalists not to engage. Rather, they should be doing what we are doing here at EchoDitto: teaching people how to use Twitter and other tools successfully.

In working at EchoDitto for many years, I have learned that very rarely is the answer to not engage. We teach our clients how to engage their audience in a productive way. Journalists are taught to be, and try to remain, unbiased. In the end, it is not Twitter, it is simply the written word. As a journalist, when you are writing, you should always keep in mind the publication you work for, the story you are reporting, and the brand you represent. Whether it's Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, or the front page of The Washington Post, your words will be judged. So choose wisely.