Fish food

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Fish food
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Cool ongoing projects
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• AdResults
• XML Feeds
• RSS
• the geography project
• power your website wizard

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AdResults
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The AdResults project allows our partner
organizations to associate themselves with
arbitrary search results.
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An AdResult Partner
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AdResults with Search Results
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XML Feeds
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The Idealist database is an asset of
extraordinary value. To ensure that we do not
dilute that value, we only allow a few, special
partners to take parts of our data for their own
use. We do this by using XML feeds.
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What is an XML feed?
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• XML is like HTML
• designed for exchanging data between programs
• a feed is an XML file that we generate and put
  on our webservers
• our legitimate partners grab the feed every
  night and import the XML data into their database

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XML Feeds The results
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RSS Feeds
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Rss feeds are becoming very important in the new
Web 2.0 world. We will begin to offer RSS feeds
for many different aspects on Idealist(as).org
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What is an RSS Feed?
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• its an XML file
• Has a strict, well-known format
• Is designed for exchanging data between websites
  and users, or between websites and other websites
• Usually requires a special RSS Reader program
• RSS means Really Simple Syndication

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What does this mean for our users / staff?
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• Users can create RSS feeds for any search that
  interests them, like Arts Jobs in New York, New
  York, USA
• They subscribe to that feed in their RSS
  Reader program, and every few minutes they will
  receive all updates that match that search
• We can offer RSS feeds to our admin staff for
  new invoices, career fair or conference
  registrations, etc.

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RSS Example
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And then
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A new matching org is approved
And a few minutes later, the user sees
HOW COOL IS THAT?!
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The Geography Project
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Our database has grown very organically over the
past 10 years. It contains a lot of geographic
information, but much of this information has
been entered by our users as part of their
records. much of the data is very bad. We need
to clean it up.
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Motivations for the cleanup
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• Allowing proximity searching. Eg. Show me all
  the volunteer opportunities within 25km of my
  home.
• User-friendly selection of city, state and
  country in entry forms.
• Improving search and browse accuracy.
• Using tools like google maps requires accurate
  geographic information

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But whats wrong with the data?
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• typos and spelling errors everywhere! (even
  americans cant spell massachusetts!)
• people often enter bad information for the state
  field (eg. in countries with no states, they
  sometimes enter something random!)
• we currently dont distinguish between country
  and territory, which creates confusion (for
  people from places like Puerto Rico and guam!)

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How will the cleanup work?
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• we have found a large database of 2 million
  cities that we can use for free
• we have state/country/latitude/longitude
  information for every one
• Leo has developed a system to locate bad
  entries in our DB and fix them, if possible
• every entry we fix, we also remember, so we can
  fix future entries the same way

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Power Your Website
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summary
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