We spent money. The workers at AOET Kenya rely on Internet connectivity. While it may seem strange to think that an AIDS organization in Webuye, Kenya has such a reliance, it is still a fact. Staff members frequently communicate via email with the AOET International Coordination Office (ICO) in Uganda and with donors and sponsors around the world to ensure that business continues and that much needed funding is secured. In order to do that, they would travel via public transport to the nearest Internet cafe–a two-hour round trip drive–and pay per-minute rates for a slow, shared connection. If one cafe was closed, they would travel to another cafe in an attempt to get their work done. Although it was a tough way to work, they did this for a very long time because they could not afford their own wireless modem, which cost $200US.

I’m proud to say that Hackers for Charity has stepped in to fill that need. We expensed the money for a Huawei Technologies USB Modem Model E220, like the one shown below.

I was delighted to receive the following email from Joseph, the first email sent from his desk in Webuye:

Hello Johnny,
Greetings from Kenya. Thank you so much for your support for the work in Kenya. Please pass our appreciation to Hackers for Charity. This message is being sent from my office desk connected to the Huawei Tchnologies USB Modem Model E220, using Safaricom as the service providers. I will let Danstone make the official communication. All we have to do now is to keep loading airtime either on monthly basis KES 2000 (about $33US) The convenience, the flexibility and the speed is equally good for one computer. I want to see if we can have two or so connected on network and see what speed we can get. Thanks again.

Greet all the folks, the family and the Hackers for Charity.

Your brother,
Joseph

Most clients seeking a Flash site (like the “Righteous Tribe” project here) need an HTML-based “mirror” of their site to accommodate not only web crawlers (which need to understand the site’s content) but also visitors using older browsers or slow Internet connections.

The goal of this project is to create a look-alike “Tribe” HTML site that pulls data from the same MySQL-fed PHP script used in the “FlashCMS” project. In layman’s terms this means that clients will get a sweet-looking Flash site and a more practical, matching HTML site, each of which are updated simultaneously through a web-based administrative console.

The music group “Righteous Tribe” hails from Uganda, Africa, where the members each individually worked for various aid-focussed NGO’s. They have each travelled the world raising funds to support organizations like AOET (www.aoet.org) and to come alongside the world’s most vulnerable people. Now, they have formed the US-based group “Righteous Tribe” to take their group to the next level and attempt to catch the eye of a record company. Although they are striking out commercially to provide a better life for their families, their commitment to the underprivileged has not waned. They still perform fundraising events and have committed themselves to raising funds for those less fortunate, regardless of how “big” they get. In the purest sense, this is not a “charity” project, as the group is not a charity, but our volunteers were willing to come alongside them and develop a site worthy of an up-and-coming music group.

The founder of “the Tribe” picked a nice-looking Flash website from a template company. This provided the foundation for the site, but updating the site required heavy knowledge of very expensive software (Adobe Flash CS3, specifically) and this did not fit our goal of putting our clients in complete control of our “creations”. So the goal of this project was to create an interface that would allow “the Tribe” to update their website through a web browser. Our volunteer (Peter) came up with the idea of the “FlashCMS” which would allow this update capability as long as the Flash template was modified to read data (blog entries, news, photos, videos, music, etc) from a PHP script fed by a MySQL database. This project required not only working knowledge of Flash, but also PHP, MySQL and JavaScript coding experience. Peter took on the entire project, leading to the creation of what we call “FlashCMS v1.0″. It is our hope that “FlashCMS” can be used to provide a Flash-based website for other clients as well.

With “v1.0″ completed, our focus turns to securing and beta-testing the application. In addition to the FlashCMS, most clients seeking a Flash site need an HTML-based “mirror” of their site to accommodate not only web crawlers (which need to understand the site’s content) but also visitors using older browsers or slow Internet connections. This need for an HTML site spawned another project which seeks to create a look-alike HTML site that pulls data from the same MySQL-fed PHP script. In layman’s terms this means that clients will get a sweet-looking Flash site and a more practical, matching HTML site, each of which are updated simultaneously through a web-based administrative console.