• Personalization – Make it easier to set the organizations you’re interested in and to subscribe to their events
• Social Network integration – Make it easier to share events with your friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, etc.
• Mobile integration – Develop a more mobile-friendly site or apps for the top mobile platforms
• Organizations – The site is heavily focused on civic-oriented organizations and events; it could expand to include a broader set of non-profit groups
• Geography – Should the site expand to another metro area?
• Other – Do you have another suggestion?

Please leave a comment, post on CivicCal’s wall on Facebook, tweet at @RobDolin or @CivicCal, send an email, or otherwise get in-touch.  Thanks very much–

–Rob

I was pleasantly surprised to find Constant Contact has a compiled list of average Open, Bounce, and Click-Through rates for their customers segmented by around two-dozen businesses.  You can find this at: http://constantcontact.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/3194/p/450%2C453/r_id/111930.  Enjoy–
–Rob

Facebook

Searching for just the words “Washington, DC” on Facebook yields a bunch of junk results, but by filtering to People and picking the Washington, DC location, I got a bunch of quick results of my friends in the DC-area.  Here’s a link to the specific query: http://www.facebook.com/search/results.php?lo=2427178&wk=&ed=&ny=&q=Washington%2C+DC&type=users

And here are the settings I used:

LinkedIn

For LinkedIn, you need to click the “Advanced” link:

And then set your options:

Here’s a canonical URL: http://www.linkedin.com/search/fpsearch?searchLocationType=I&countryCode=us&postalCode=20005

Next: Contact Import

Given these useful discoveries, I’m importing contacts from systems that have less robust people search (or out-of-date user profiles) like AOL/AIM.

Happy connecting–
–Rob

Apps

• 4th & Mayor – A second foursquare app
• Adobe Reader – When someone
• American Airlines – For booking travel and checking on rewards
• Evernote – Syncs my notes between my phones and PC’s.
• Facebook – When I want to search for Events on Facebook
• Foursquare – My favorite local social app
• Gowalla – Great local app for some cities including their hometown of Austin, TX
• Microsoft Tag Reader
• Seesmic – Posting to multiple social media accounts
• Twitter – When I want to view Twitters lists
• Yelp – Checking local reviews
• YouTube – watching the occasional video that a friend shares

Games

• ChickenImplosion – Great game premise and entertaining graphics
• Flow – A geometry puzzle app written by a friend
• Kill the Duck – Like “Duck Hunt” from your old 8-bit Nintendo
• Impossible Shoota – Space Invaders with really nice graphics
• The Oregon Trail HD – Yeah, like you played on the old Apple ][e
• Swipy man – Cute physics-based game
• Unite – It’s like the old “Marble Madness” arcade game

Seattle/WA specific

• OneBusAway – Our local public transit app; tells when the next bus is coming
• Seattle Traffic – For seeing the WSDOT map of how congested the highways are

If you’re thinking about getting a new SmartPhone, here are my recommendations on the USA-based carriers based on which devices are available as of mid-August 2011:

Thanks for visiting–
–Rob

P.S. For more apps and games, check-out the Featured, Top Free, and Top Paid lists of Windows Phone apps. 

It will be hard to measure, but I’ll be curious to see if this has some impact on peripheral awareness of the campaign and people choosing to vote for Mr. Classen.

Step 0: Activate

It looks like Facebook is offering me a chance to upgrade to their messaging platform. 

Here’s the screens of what I went through if folks are interested:

Step 1: Choosing an email alias

Step 2: Enabling text messaging

(I’ll be turning this off if Facebook doesn’t have a good relevance system for limiting who can send me a Facebook message as a text.)

If you’re also using Facebook’s new messaging, please leave a comment with any tips and/or let me know what you think.  Thanks very much–

–Rob

Thanks to the Internet Archive’s “Wayback Machine” I was able to find the officers from every year going back to 1999.  This was something that I was really pleasantly surprised to be able to find!

This also gave me a new appreciation for the importance of making pages accessible to web crawlers. (Thanks Andrew V. of the Northwest Progressive Institute for peaking my curiosity on this with some comments about rendering a calendar server-side.) 

In 2009, the left navigation was changed from a server-rendered menu to a client-rendered menu that leveraged JavaScript.  I don’t remember noticing a significant user experience change, but the Internet Archive’s crawler did not pick-up the JavaScript nav (and the various pages that were thus linked.)

Overall, this was a great discovery.  Check-out the evolution of the King County Democrats web presence over the last 10 years: http://wayback.archive.org/web/*/http://www.kcdems.org/ or the evolution of almost any site: http://wayback.archive.org/web/. 

Contact Us

Our new address will be:

2511 W. Montlake Pl. E
Seattle, WA 98112

Get directions with Bing

Come Visit in Seattle

We’re looking to set-up one of the bedrooms as a guest room and welcome our friends and family to Seattle.  My sister will be visiting from Chicago, IL for a weekend in July and cousin Matthew from Salt Lake City, UT will be spending a weekend in August.  Especially for friends from rougher climates, Seattle’s summers are beautiful and Seattle’s winters are very mild. 

First Meal

Two of our best friends, Michaela and Kevin, were in town from DC and joined us for our first meal in the new home yesterday.  (Pagliacci Pizza and L’Ecole No 41 wine.)  The sellers did not leave furniture so our current dining room is populated with a CostCo table and four CostCo folding chairs.

Through the wonders many, many people linking the words “santorum” or “rick santorum” to the aforementioned site, it’s the top hit on Bing (and some other search engine.)

It’s amazing the impact a large number of small websites and blogs can have if they work together.