Firsthand Look: Invisible Children Schools for Schools
March 07, 2012 by Jonathan Dietz
Just a couple days ago, I was in the Ugandan office of the human rights organization Invisible Children. I was on a mission, along with three other colleagues, to see their progress in rebuilding the war-torn region of northern Uganda, and able to get a first hand look at all of their programs. We were awestruck at how much they are doing.
First, some facts: Before the war, five out of the top 10 schools in Uganda were located in the north. But during the war, no school from the north made the list of top 100 schools. In the wake of the LRA, the northern part of Uganda has been devastated in many ways, education being one of them.
Unlike in the U.S., the government of Uganda covers the full cost for a student's primary education, but only half of the cost of a student’s secondary education (meaning middle school and high school). The burden of the remaining cost is placed on parents or guardians. Many students—and most orphans—are unable to attend school beyond the primary school age. This affects girls disproportionately, because culturally many families don’t see the benefit of paying for their daughters’ education.
Jonathan Dietz Software Engineer
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Drupal: The CMS Bulldozer
December 09, 2011 by Jonathan Dietz
Smashing Magazine’s recent article claims to tell "How WordPress took the CMS Crown from Drupal and Joomla" -- but over what kingdom does WordPress truly reign?
I'd agree with the author's 3 main points: Wordpress is more focused—on blogging—than Drupal. You can see this acknowledged in various Drupal forums, where people occasionally say how Wordpress does ‘x’ or ‘y’ better than Drupal.
Drupal tries to be everything to everyone, while Wordpress tries to be the best blogging tool. Wordpress can also handle regular CMS functionality, but not in a "best practices" way.
Jonathan Dietz Software Engineer
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eBay Searches for the X-factor in Commerce with Magento Acquisition
June 14, 2011 by Jonathan Dietz
eBay recently announced their acquisition of Los Angeles-based Magento, the makers of the popular open source eCommerce platform that powers many online retailers. The acquisition comes after eBay spent $22.5 million for a 49% share in the company a year earlier and on the heals of their multi-billion dollar deal of Skype to Microsoft.
The acquisition is part of eBay’s larger strategy to control a larger portion of the value chain in commerce and is using their recent influx of cash acquiring companies and the technology they own to do it. eBay as a company is evolving and they are building a “global, open commerce platform that leverages the worldwide developer community” and they see Magento as the core of this new platform.
What Magento brings to the table is a platform that could make it easier for users to utilize eBay’s other assets such as Paypal, or even eBay.com. The situation may be similar to Apple’s music and app strategy. Apple created a platform (iTunes Store & App Stores) and was able to capitalize on the transactions of items that other people produce and sell on it. The app store has been so successful on mobile devices that Apple extended the platform to their main operating system that runs their desktops and laptops.
Jonathan Dietz Software Engineer
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Google's Instant Search: What is it and how will it change SEO and SEM?
September 10, 2010 by Jonathan Dietz
Have you heard of Google Instant? It's their new Instant Search (you need to be logged in with a Google account to see, if you don't see it already). Google claims it won't affect rankings (and I believe them), but it will undoubtedly affect search marketing in some way, and many people in the SEO industry are rushing to find out how.
One apparent thing that will change is search volume and (more specifically) volume on popular keywords. Each keystroke you type in the window is now an entire search query. This means as soon as you type in the first letter Google returns a full page search with the most popular keyword for that letter, all without hitting the enter key. (Typing in "W" returns a query for "weather" including your local weather forecast).
Jonathan Dietz Software Engineer
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