I just received notice of the next Drupal Convention coming up next month, and am curious to see if African developers are planning to attend or contribute. Drupal is the open source platform that powers the Kabissa community website, and DrupalCon is always a much heralded and powerful event. Follow on twitter at @drupalcon and @drupal. Details below. 

*Please forward Widely*

This week Africa Action relaunched our website, www.africaaction.org.  I hope you will agree that the new website is far more accessible, and has much deeper content.

Here are some of the new advantages:

Do you use gmail? If so, be aware that it exposes you to a potentially serious privacy flaw - if you work in human rights or otherwise don't want to share who you email with to the public, you need to read this post for an explanation.

Happy New Year! I received an inquiry from a longtime Kabissa member organization in Somalia that is interested in upgrading their institutional website from Microsoft Frontpage. It newly being 2010, now is a great time to explore the options. From their email: 

What we need is changing our website from FrontPage to PHP if its suitable for you and hope you will respond positively.

We really so tired to work FrontPage and the country is not so good and it will not easy to you to stay one place because you moved place to place at some times.

I was pleased to receive the announcement below regarding the release of the latest version of Dada Mail, a powerful listserv tool. It's free software that is fairly easy to install on a traditional server supporting the Perl programming language, and very easy to use once installed. I've always been a big fan, not least "Since Justin is an Artist, he has decided that Dada Mail is an Art Object." Check out the Dadamail Manifesto for more details about what Dada Mail can do and how it can be viewed as an art object.

We always resisted implementing Dada Mail for Kabissa because we wanted to create an integrated community platform, which we were able to do with Drupal. This doesn't mean it can't be a perfect email companion to your website.

I learned today via Tech Crunch that Google Sites Become Prettier With Templates, and had a poke around in Kabissa's own Google Sites account. I found that, indeed, it is now possible to choose from a range of attractive and apparently thoughtfully designed website templates. This includes the depicted "NGO template" tailored for organizations that typically want to display the same kind of info on an impactful site.

Africa Gathering: Sharing ideas for positive change.

What is Africa Gathering?
Africa Gathering, the event that brings technophiles, thinkers, entrepreneurs, innovators and everybody else together to talk about positive change in sustainable development, technology, social networking, health, education, environment and good governance in Africa, is coming to Nairobi on 21st and 22nd December 2009.

Our goal is to help highlight all of the great work being done in the world by Africans and friends of Africa. We are even able to help budding innovators and entrepreneurs by putting the profits of our events in to some the projects that our attendees like the most, this way we live out our ideal of sustainability without charity.

As a result, by attending you are not only directly supporting some of Africa's most innovative entrepreneurs and innovators, you are able to meet, network and share ideas with them - helping build confidence and develop interest in Africa-focussed initiatives and businesses. Everyone can benefit from this enlightening experience.

How can I get tickets?
Book & Pay for tickets using PayPal: http://agnairobi.eventbrite.com (Not available in Kenya due to PayPal Sanctions)
Reserve tickets online in Kenya and pay on the door in Shillings: http://agnairobi.eventbrite.com (Click on Other Payment Options, under the PayPal button on the order form and reserve your ticket so you can pay on the door).

Website: http://www.africagathering.org
Videos: http://www.vimeo.com/africagathering/videos

This appeal came to me directly from ANLoc - please check urgently if your language is among the locales yet to be created. This is a terrific, easy opportunity to make a world of difference in just a few short hours. Thanks! -Tobias

Kabissa helped dozens of Kabissa members to migrate their websites to Media Temple grid-service. We've had a few inquiries about how to update FTP programs like WS_FTP to log into Media Temple instead of the Kabissa server from now on. The recipe is below. 

WS_FTP is quite old and no longer available as a free download - I would recommend switching to a newer program like FileZilla.