Posted on July 9, 2008 by jtreadway
The last week or so our team has been struggling with search performance against our database of 1.4 million charities/nonprofits. We’re making progress, but the causes for the performance issue have been very difficult to pin down.
Givvy uses the Lucene search engine, which is in its native rendition a part of the Apache project. By [...]
Filed under: Development | Tagged: Development, lucene, performance, seth, sflucene | No Comments »
Posted on July 3, 2008 by jtreadway
The last few days our development team has been wrestling with a particularly difficult technical issue with the Givvy site. Specifically, the our site was “leaking” memory on our servers to the degree that Givvy became unusable after only minutes of activity. For those of you who don’t know what a memory leak is, it’s [...]
Filed under: Development | Tagged: lucene, memory leak, PHP, Symfony | No Comments »
Posted on June 26, 2008 by jtreadway
We’ve got a big demo tomorrow and are working frantically to fix bugs and spruce it up. Typical startup stuff. Fortunately here in Framingham we have lots of food options for the late night. Unfortunately the chicken fajita roll-up I just ate was not good. Way too much oil on the grill. Oh well, can’t [...]
Filed under: Development, startup | Tagged: demo | No Comments »
Posted on May 12, 2008 by jtreadway
Givvy - Giving Management + Network for Good | NetSquared, a project of TechSoup.org
Hi Friends - we’ve just entered the NetSquared DonateNow Challenge sponsored by the Case Foundation in conjunction with our donation partner, Network for Good.
We’re competing for a $10k prize from the Case Foundation - so if you think we’re onto something, please [...]
Filed under: Development, Fundraising, Givving is Broken | Tagged: net2, netsquared, techsoup | No Comments »
Posted on April 28, 2008 by jtreadway
We have been building Givvy using PHP. Early on we decided to try to use a development framework to be more productive. The most popular Web 2.0 development frameworks is Ruby on Rails. Rails is the framework that works with the Ruby programming language. Ruby is fine, but our team knows [...]
Filed under: Development | Tagged: Development, PHP, Symfony | No Comments »
Posted on April 16, 2008 by jtreadway
I just read a great post from Beth Kantor regarding the impact of Facebook on charitable donations. It raises the question of impact, but the data is still not complete. So, I’m going to take a stab here by analyzing the top charity app on Facebook - Causes.
Quick note on Causes: a [...]
Filed under: Development, Fundraising, Giving Patterns | Tagged: causes, facebook, giving | 3 Comments »
Posted on March 20, 2008 by jtreadway
A key partner we need to execute the site is looking for over $35k to use their API every year, plus an $8,000 set up fee. We’re bootstrapped and need to conserve cash. Aside from the fact that I find it hard to see how it costs them $35k per year to support a partner [...]
Filed under: Development, startup | Tagged: startup | No Comments »
Posted on March 13, 2008 by jtreadway
We had our first demo of Givvy today for a VC. The site is coming along nicely and the demo was flawless. Great work Seth & James! There was a bit of a debate with one of the partners about whether or not we should seek to get active support from charities in order to [...]
Filed under: Development, Fundraising, Giving Patterns | No Comments »
Posted on February 28, 2008 by jtreadway
It’s easy, if you just throw any old junk up on a page. On the other hand, building a good one is much harder than it appears. The givvy site is coming along well, but sometimes it can be very frustrating. I was working on one page last night - not the code, mind you [...]
Filed under: Development | 1 Comment »
