VillageToolbox Blog

Wow, so it’s been over a year since the last post. Much has happened since then, but not much work has been done on the toolbox. I’m beginning to think about it again, so hopefully you’ll see some new features and blog posts showing up soon.

It’s been a while since I last posted.  Things got pretty busy here with Supergroup, fly and Darkstar taking up most waking hours.  This weekend, I put it all aside, and focused on getting all the recent improvements from the beta site over to the live site.  We’ve added tabs for most of the content to improve the site interface, and we’ve now completely implemented the ad engine.

You can now design a complete banner ad right on the villagetoolbox site, add clipart, customize the background and schedule it to run for you community.  Pretty cool, I think.

I’ve been working on the Ad engine for the last couple of weeks, and I just noticed last night that the New Account creation had a nasty bug that stopped it from working. I apologize to anyone who was affected, but to make it up, I’m sharing the recipe for our ‘Not Really Very Good Brownies’ that got rave reviews at our park bake sale on Saturday.

Dahlia and I spent a couple of years perfecting this recipe, so enjoy, and here ya go…

• 3/4 cup butter
• 1 1/2 cups sugar
• 2 tablespoons water
• 200 g dark chocolate (good quality. We use the PC Swiss Dark), broken into pieces
• 3 eggs
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 2/3 cup flour
• 1 cup white chocolate pieces (belgium baking wafers from Bulk Barn work best)

Preheat the oven to 325 degrees F.  Line a pan with teflon tin foil if desired (it makes it much easier to remove them).

Melt butter, sugar, water in saucepan, bring to boil and let boil for 2 minutes.

Take off the heat, add the chocolate and stir until melted. Let it cool for a minute, then stir in the eggs and vanilla. Add flour and mix well.

Add white chocolate and quickly pour it into the pan.

Bake for 30-35 minutes. Brownies are done when a skewer poked in the middle has wet crumbs stuck to it, but no streaks of batter.

Let the brownies set in the fridge overnight before cutting, but they are best served at room temperature.

Exciting news! We have finaly heard back from the city about our neighbourhood plans to put a permanent BBQ into the park.  This is exciting for me, because after a year of pushing and emailing, and jumping through hoops, I was beginning to believe that it was never going to happen.

So, now we have permission from the city to begin fabrication. That means no going back – they can’t change their minds once we’ve spent money of building it. It also means that the onus is now on us, the community, to move the project forward. After so long, this is an interesting turn of events. Also it means (hopefully) that I get to do some cool welding now.

We need to make a number of decisions now.  What material do we use (what can we afford). How do we design it? How do we anchor it? How do we make sure the neighbourhood teenagers don’t break it n the first 2 weeks.  So much to do!

Summertime so far has been busy, filled with camping trips, friends cottages and sunny days in the lake.  Adding this to an already full schedule has been a little difficult, and has significantly slowed down the development of VillageToolBox.  Still, it’s important to practise what you preach, and so time with the kid, and time spent on neighbourhood pursuits has overshadowed my plans for world domination.

Soon, I’ll be back into the full swing of development, and hope to really take the site live in the early fall.  Still for the time being, I have a few more sunburns to rack up.

Me, Juliet and 2 pounds of fresh local cherries spent the afternoon at the wading pool. Sadly, the cherries did not make it home.

Things have been a little slow on the development front for the last couple of weeks.  I’ve been pretty busy working on the next revision of the Supergroup application for Condition30, and also on a project for MarbleMedia.  Both of which are a bit behind on tight deadlines. 

The time I have had has been spent working on a the flash-based Ad Creator, and also on a submission for the TechCrunch50 conference.  I decided at the last minute that I really should pull together a video for submission, and I was determined to film it in the park with kids playing in the background, but the weather lately has been nothing but thunderstorms. I finally managed to film it Wednesday night, one kid (Thanks Mitchell) obligingly skated round the wading pool while I filmed. I have a much greater respect for actors now, since discovering how hard it was to make it though my lines.  Even then, once I edited, I found my best takes were interrupted by thunder in the background.

Ah well, the end product (I thought) was good enough.  A bit more amateurish than I’d like, and the camera does add 100 pounds (right?!?), but I think it’s a decent enough elevator pitch.  Wish me luck.

The last week has been a whirlwind of activity in Sunny Acres. Last Saturday was the annual park party. We probably had a couple of hundred people there, lots of food, lots of really good music (all from the neighbourhood) and lots of games for the kids.  We raised almost $400 for the BBQ installation. We also had someone approach us who works at a local company who thinks he can convince his company to provide all the materials, and possibly weld it for us!

Wednesday night, we had a BBQ planning meeting to come up with designs for the barbeque, and I think we’ve now got a pretty good idea what we are looking for.

Then, Friday night, we had Alma and Jessica come from GIRC to get the neighbourhood started on a drought resistant garden project that is looking like it’s gonna be pretty cool. Followed by a movie night.  We showed a series on animated shorts, then Tin Tin.

This Saturday is the annual park party is coming up this Saturday, and we have something to celebrate.  We have received a list of conditions from the city that we need to comply with to get our community barbeque, and every last one is totally do-able.  We’re puling together a working group now to design the bbq, and source materials.  I’m hoping we’ll have it installed within a couple of months.

Apparently you can fight city hall (or at least work with them nicely).

I’ll admin that I am of those people that has a list of reasons to dislike Microsoft.  In fact, we have something called ‘The Giant Pumpkin List’ which patiently waits for the day when we have a surplus of Atlanta Giant Pumpkins and the use of a helicopter for a week.

Anyway, Hotmail’s been pissing me off lately. First off, there is the general crappyness of the service, combined, and the archaic load balancing solution they use.  But what’s really been getting to me has been my inability to get any of my emails to anyone with a hotmail account.

A typical mail message get through to yahoo, gmail, and pretty much every other mail service without incident. But Hotmail?  No, Hotmail feels the need to just discard my emails completely. No warning, no attempt for check them against user defined whitelists. Just BAM! See ya buddy.

Now, my server set up consisted of using a python bridge to send emails from PHP, through the local JAMES smtp server. Worked pretty well, except for hotmail.  Well, after much effort put into checking spf records, rDNS, DomainKeys, changing every variable, one at a time, we have something that seems to work.  I gotrid of the python intermediary, switched to SwiftMail to talk to the JAMES smtp, and that seems to work. I can at least get into the Spam folder now.

But why does Hotmail have to be such a whiny little bitch?