In addition to the already existing Open API’s* that have been resident in Revolution Online since last year (2008), we have now enabled two-way synchronization with Democracy in Action.  This has gone into production last week and it enables ROI Customers that are using the DIA interface the ability to synchronize records between the two systems.  This is done online and Real-Time and does not require an export/import between the two systems. [Note: the ROI Solutions/Convio WebServices platform was launched earlier this year].

* Open APIs are used by many of our clients to connect their ROI Revolution database to their organizational website, thus having information and updates as well as donation informatio coming directly into their databases real-time and online.

I like this.

http://www.wordle.net/

Wordle is a toy for creating “word clouds” from text.  Quite simply, the more frequent the word in the text, the greater prominence given to it in the resulting image.  Okay.  Neat.  Either give it a URL for a blog or blog feed (or paste the text into it’s paste function) and then see what happens next.

It’s always good to know how you sound.  Like when I like do like presentations I like to know like if I say a word like over and like over and like over.  Cause like sometimes like people say words all the time and they like don’t hear it and it like makes all of us like crazy.  You know, you know you know?

I mean you can certainly READ a blog and get the gist, but it’s so much more fun to see it graphically….

<here’s a ROI Blog post, warts and all>

Following up on our investigation of Google Chrome a few days ago, it turns out that another beta release of IE8 has also recently become available. We haven’t seen any of our users playing with it, but decided to give it a whirl just because. Our bottom line recommendation: don’t bother. Here are some peculiarities that you might experience within our database portal.

• There is a serious spacing weirdness throughout almost all pages, including things like the five-pixel border of our main page displays as 20 pixels wide in IE8.
• Many DHTML features take ridiculously long to paint and refresh: it’s even worse than IE6, if that’s possible. To illustrate by example: when loading a fairly complex DHTML page in IE8, I got tired of waiting for the screen to refresh. I opened Chrome, went to Revolution Online, logged in, switched to the other tab, selected the command I wanted, accessed the screen, and started typing — all before the IE8 screen’s hourglass had finished whirling and the screen was refreshed.
• It does some really weird things when you’re typing in a large textbox (like the one I’m typing this note into, which is similar to those throughout most of our app). While you type, it flashes the scrollbar as though it’s recalculating the height of the world, and if you get to a point where you are typing into the area below the initial scroll-line, it pops the text you are typing in and out of the visible area of the screen twice for each keystroke. Quite annoying, IMO.
• It’s interesting to play with, and certainly compatible with our app as far as we can tell from a half-hour of banging on it… but frankly there’s nothing really compelling in there. We think if you try it at this early beta stage you’ll end up seriously annoyed with it and wish you hadn’t.
• Oh, and it crashed while we were typing this note. We’re not sure if that’s because it could tell what we were saying, but be warned.

February 2nd Followup on IE 8 — Wanted to mention that IE8 is now in official production status, and all of the issues described in this note seem to have been resolved.