Hack for Western Mass is one of 96 events happening nationwide as part of the National Day of Civic Hacking. The National Day of Civic Hacking is an event during which citizens from around the country will work together with local, state and federal governments as well as private sector organizations with the common goal of improving their community. Hack for Western Mass is also licensed under Random Hacks of Kindness.

Listen to Becky Sweger from National Priorities Project, another organizer, describe the event in an interview with Monte on 93.9.

Should you come help out?

I’ve been involved in organizing this event for the past six weeks. It’s been a great experience, and it promises to be an amazing event. We’ve collected a great array of challenges to help local organizations. For example:

• Mapping Safety Net Service Needs: create a map for Community Action in Greenfield that compares the location of people receiving safety net services with Census demographic data that shows where the services are most needed.
• Benefits of Banking Locally: Compare our deposits in local banks and credit unions vs national banks and create a visual way to show how banking locally benefits area residents and businesses. Lots of people know the benefits of eating locally and shopping locally, but many don’t know why banking locally makes so much sense.
• Mapping Wells and Water Quality: Massachusetts doesn’t track the location of private wells, a problem that can lead to water contamination. A database of private wells can help planning, reduce costs, and estimate water quality.
• Seed Swap Database: Develop an online seed library to share information about locally available seeds, strengthen food sovereignty, self-reliance, local resiliency and adaptability of crops, and empower community building.

We’ve found some great local sponsors to help feed people as they work through the weekend. If you haven’t registered to come yet, there are still a couple spots available. Sign up now!

This website is intended to communicate about the intergenerational foster care community in Easthampton. The organization also would like to spread the word about re-envisioning foster care, creating an extended network that can replicate this model around the country.

The site features a blog, a news area, information about living in the community, the national network, and allows donors to give money.  The design is responsive to the viewers screen size, allowing it to be easily viewed on many different devices.  Among other things, a calendar allows events to be posted easily:

Images and videos can be viewed in galleries and also in a lightbox without leaving the current page:

Plone lets non-technical people create and maintain information for a public website or an intranet using only a web browser. Plone is easy to understand and use — allowing users to be productive in just half an hour — yet offers a wealth of community-developed add-ons and extensibility to keep meeting your needs for years to come.

Blending the creativity and speed of open source with a technologically advanced Python back-end, Plone offers superior security without sacrificing power or extensibility.

Check out some of my Plone projects.

Tracker maintains a prioritized backlog of project deliverables, broken down into small, estimated pieces, called stories. It dynamically groups these stories into fixed segments of time, called iterations, and it predicts progress based on real historical performance.

Git is a free & open source, distributed version control system designed to handle everything from small to very large projects with speed and efficiency.  Every Git clone is a full-fledged repository with complete history and full revision tracking capabilities, not dependent on network access or a central server. Branching and merging are fast and easy to do.

GitHub is a great way to collaborate with others. It has really been a boon for many open source projects.  Fork, send pull requests and manage all your public and private git repositories. It also provides an offsite backup ensuring that your project is safe.

You can see some of my open source projects at my github account.

WordPress started as just a blogging system, but has evolved to be used as full content management system and so much more through the thousands of plugins, widgets, and themes.  It is easy to use and it works great!

Check out some of the ways I’ve used WordPress.

It’s built with WordPress using a responsive design to accomodate everything from phones to tablets to desktop browsers.  There are a  few interesting plugins:

The Facebook Like Box allows visitors to share the articles with their friends on Facebook.  Getting the word out to friends and subscribers is one of the key use cases for this website.  A Google Analytics plugin allows staff to evaluate how successful social media campaigns have been in driving visitors to the site.

FlexPaper, a web-based document viewer, allows visitors to browse the PDF version of newspapers without leaving the current page they are viewing.

Their front-end framework, Bootstrap, has been getting acclaim all over the web for quite a while now.  And rightly so.  It’s a great package providing sane design starting points, including nice typography, a responsive grid, buttons, icons, menus, alerts, modal dialogs, carousels, and more.  There’s been a lot of interesting work done around the Bootstrap framework as well.  For instance, check out Font Awesome, a set of beautiful icons.

Bootstrap uses the LESS framework, a dynamic stylesheet language, extending CSS with dynamic behavior such as variables, mixins, operations and functions.  I’ve been using LESS with other projects and it’s really nice.  But once you’ve got all your LESS files, you will want to convert them to plain CSS and maybe even compress them.  I’ve found Twitter’s Recess to be a great tool for this.

Another great tool for managing projects with a lot of dependencies is Twitter’s Bower.  A front-end package manager, it can automatically install and upgrade dependencies.  You can install jquery, bootstrap, and just about anything else you might want with a single command.  Makes life just a bit simpler…

I used the python bindings to develop this commandline tool. While this script is tied to this particular dataset and task, it should be easily modifiable to automate other similar tasks that would otherwise require significant repetitive input from a GIS analyst. These powerful tools are worth checking out.

WordPress is one of the best blogging platforms available, but it isn’t really designed to be used in multiple environments. It isn’t too difficult to setup multiple environments, though. Configuration variables can be read in from environment variables that tell WordPress which environment it is in.

With Apache, add the environment variables to your .htaccess file:

SetEnv WP_DB your_database_name
SetEnv WP_USERNAME your_username
SetEnv WP_PASSWORD your_password

Then you can grab these settings in the WordPress configuration file, wp-config.php:

// The name of the database for WordPress
define('DB_NAME', $_ENV['WP_DB']);
// MySQL database username
define('DB_USER', $_ENV['WP_USERNAME']);
// MySQL database password
define('DB_PASSWORD', $_ENV['WP_PASSWORD']);
// For developers: WordPress debugging
define('WP_DEBUG', $_ENV['WP_DEBUG']);
// Override the wp_options and set the site
define('WP_SITEURL', 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);
define('WP_HOME', 'http://' . $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME']);

You can also set these environment variables using nginx:

include fastcgi_params;
fastcgi_param WP_DB your_database;
fastcgi_param WP_USERNAME your_username;
fastcgi_param WP_PASSWORD your_password;

You probably also need to tell php to load your environment variables in php.ini:
variables_order = "EGPCS"

Now you can have multiple environments set up to use with your version control without any additional direct configuration of WordPress.