One of the skills that I pretty much missed in my back-to-college tour in the early 2000′s was CSS. Oh, we heard that it meant Cascading Style Sheets and got to play with it a bit, but it wasn’t the BIG THING that it is today. I’ve been thinking, in the back of my tech consultant mind, that I need to know more about CSS, but the price of the books and the online training always held me back.

So you can imagine my delight to learn of this site that has free tutorials for folks like me. Check it out if you want to expand your web development skills!

And another voice adds:

The best thing is to have a staging area to test things out in. You can check your work in browsers to make sure it looks good, but also try validating your html/css to ensure it is being done properly:
http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/

Why I like it for password management (remembering all those *other* accounts) is that it keeps it all in the cloud, encrypted, secure, yada yada.  This means that things I store from one place or another are instantly available on the plethora of other devices that occupy my batman-like urban utility belt.  LastPass makes clients for about everything – firefox, IE, droid, iThings, etc.  With my one LastPass account, I have magically memory access to the same list of stuff.

I use Lastpass for web credentials – all sorts of them – and it works reasonably well.  It’s not perfect – but web sites are wacky and it’s amazing the variations of credentialing systems.

But.. I also use it for storage of things I need to know and remember or use or just have handy.  Here I use the LastPass secure notes feature.  They’re notes.  About anything. Encrypted and stored in the cloud.   With a little planning, I adopted a standard format for things.  Then again, it helps that it is all searchable from within the client.

Yeah, it’s secure – only the cyphertext is stored online.  It’s decrypted using your private key by the client app – it is all encrypted and decrypted locally – Lastpass only stores the resultant pseudo-random gobbledygook. .  It never stores anything in clear text.

You can share with one or more. You can share collections (which is why I originally got it).  We have institutional memberships to a boatload of crappy and not so crappy web sites.  Trying to manage security for 100 people, all trying to use the same credentials, but only about once a year, was worse than being cursed by Apollo with the gift of prophecy.  Lastpass lets me set up the sites, manage the SSO, and distribute them (automatically across the globe) to 100 folks – a simple “shared folder” metaphor.

Costs range from free to $12 a year.  A bargain.  I’ve seen *other* sorts of password managers, keepers, and the like, but none do all that this does, and it does it relatively simply.  It ain’t a beauty .. but it works like a charm. Oh.. and it also generates secure passwords too.

Regards

Gavin

Here’s what director Valerie has to say:

On my website, I keep a calendar of free (and low cost) training courses aimed to serve those in Annual Giving fundraising. This crosses several areas, including fundraising, grant writing, social media, choosing the right database, mobile giving, etc.

You can see the events at http://bit.ly/BilouCalendar and subscribe free to receive emails 7 days ahead at http://bit.ly/SubscribeBilou (although it’s good to check the calendar now & then for events that might be posted less than 7 days in advance…)

While those in major gifts typically have the largest training budgets (and their profession remains relatively static), annual giving professionals have seen their budgets evaporate, yet their profession continues to change dramatically!

Check it out!

If you get up on Christmas Morning and find a brand new computer under the tree, think of HandyCapable!

We’d love to have your old computer!

We’ll wipe the hard drive and take all your personal information right off.

We’ll have our HandyTechs add a new operating system and new software.

And then we’ll make sure a deserving school child or a hardworking nonprofit gets to enjoy it.

http://jamestownnews.womacknewspapers.com/articles/2011/11/17/news/features/features60.txt

http://cloud4good.com/announcements/cloud-security-true-story/

On November 16th, in collaboration with the Guilford Nonprofit Consortium and the High Point Library, Dunia Fleihan of HandyCapable Network will discuss:

-Basic social media jargon and applications
-Using social media to build new relationships
-Increasing visibility, donors and event attendance
-Setting goals and measuring success
-She will also be discussing her own data collected on Guilford County nonprofits and their social media use.

We look forward to seeing you there!

 Click here to register. This event is free but you must reserve a ticket in order to attend. If you are reserving multiple tickets, please send the names of all persons for whom you are registering to cjkleeper@hotmail.com.

For questions, please call Dunia Fleihan at (336) 209-7360

Here’s the link– http://bit.ly/pFGGqf

If you decide to take advantage of this offer, do come back here and offer your opinion. If we find that our nonprofit community would like to hear about more of these webinars, we’ll post them.