Online Volunteering Technology, Tools, and Tips by Randy Tyler

Study Finds 73 percent of Bank Customers Use their Online Account Password to Access Other Web Sites

• 73 percent of bank customers use their online account password to access other websites and
• 47 percent use both their online banking user ID and password to login elsewhere on the Internet.

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.

Only Google's Web-Based E-mail Service, Gmail, Retains a Secure Connection After Log-in

Of the three major free Web-based e-mail services (Yahoo, Windows Live/Hotmail and Gmail), only Gmail retains an encrypted (secure) connection after log-in. Each mail service's secure Web site connection is identified by https (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) and verified by a Certificate Authority: VeriSign (Windows Live), Thawte (Gmail) and Equifax (Yahoo).

Yahoo mail provides an SSL (secure) connection by default but reverts back to a unencrypted http (Hypertext Transfer Protocol) connection after log-in. Windows Live, by default, is not an encrypted connection.Windows Live Mail requires a user to click on the "Enhanced Security" link (before logging-in) to connect via an https connection. After log-in, Windows Live reverts back to an unencrypted (http) connection. Gmail (Google Mail) has now enabled an encrypted (https) connection by default and remains secure while the user is logged in.

Do you use one of these free Web-based e-mail services? Do you use a public, unencrypted wireless network? If you sign in to a Web-based e-mail service via a non-secure (http) Internet connection, such as a public wireless or a non-encrypted network, you are more vulnerable to unauthorized people viewing your account information.

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.

Free, Until Feb 24, Program Easily Removes Your Forgotten Owner PDF Passwords

Have you created a password-protected PDF that prevents your content (for example, a funding proposal or an Online Volunteering Position Description) from being copied or printed but have now lost the password? PDF (Portable Document Format) files have two common passwords: Owner (the password which restricts such functions as printing or copying of a PDF file) and User (the password required to open a PDF file).

PDF Password Remover is one such easy-to-use application that will remove the encrypted Owner password to allow the copying, modifying or printing of a PDF file. As well as being easy to use application, PDF Password Remover also:

• removes the Owner password from a single file or a group of Files (see Screen capture above)
• supports Adobe PDF 1.0 to 1.7 (which is version 8)
• does not require Acrobat or Adobe Reader to be installed
• supports English, Turkish, Thai, Latin, Korean, Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Japanese and Chinese
• allows PDFs to be imported or dragged and dropped to remove Owner password
• works with Windows XP, Vista and 7 (32 bit)
• does not remove the User password required to open a PDF
• does not remove other protections, such as DRM or third party plug-ins

http://www.anypdftools.com/pdf-password-remover.html

If you do not receive your activation key (via e-mail) with a reasonable time period, contact support through their Web site. For what appeared to be a technical glitch, I had to contact support; I received an e-mail reply within a day with an accompanying activation key.

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.

How to Easily Backup Your Photos from Google's Picasa Web Albums

As a non-profit organization, there are a number of effective, easy and free ways to promote, reflect, demonstrate or illustrate your mission, whether it be, for example, your events, the contributions of your online volunteers or how you are making an impact. One such method is to use Google's (free) Web Albums. However, at minimum, you must ensure that your precious memories and stories sitting on Google's servers are regularly backed up to a local computer. One quick and easy way to backup your photos from Google's photo sharing site (without requiring other applications to be installed) is to use the free Picasa Webalbums Assistant, as I will briefly explain below.

How to download photos from Google's photo sharing site using Picasa Webalbums Assistant:

• download the zipped file (PWA0_3_1.zip) to your desktop
• extract the files from the zip archive (with WinZip, 7Zip or similar program)
• double click on the 53 KB file called "PWA3.jar"
• agree to the terms of use (if you so choose)
• if you agree to the terms of use, as shown in the screen capture above, you will now have the option to select whether you want to download a public album (where you will be prompted for the UserID of the Album owner) or an album from an invitation URL (where you will be required to copy/paste the invitation URL e-mailed to you)
• once you provide either the UserID or invitation URL, Picasa Webalbums Assistant will display thumbnails of all the photos within the specific album you haveselected
• check the photos you would like to download and then click the "Download Selected" button.
• You will then be prompted to choose a location to save your photos (I suggest you save the photos to a folder where you will be able to easily locate them, such as your desktop).

Picasa Webalbums Assistant Requirements:

• requires Java 5 or later to be installed on your Windows or Mac computer (check your version of Java)
• if you have Java 5 or later installed and doubleclicking on the PWA3.jar file fails to launch the Picasa Webalbums Assistant application, you may lost the file type/application association.
• If you are using Windows XP or Vista, you can download Jarfix 1.1. (39 KB) to restore the .jar file association to the Java Runtime Environment
• the Webalbums Assistant application (PWA3.jar) can also be launched from the command line as in the following example (the PAW3.jar file and the lib folder, which also contains nine jar files, in this example are on my desktop): C:\Documents and Settings\Randy Tyler\Desktop>java -jar PWA3.jar

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.

Easily Edit a YouTube Video with a Free FLV Editor

As a non-profit, you may want to edit your special event video you posted on YouTube but do not have the original. Over the last 20 years of working with non-profit organizations, I have experienced those occasions where a source file, whether it be the original photo, newsletter, brochure or video, was not readily available.

Specifically, you may have an FLV file (which is a compressed, Flash video file) that an online volunteer produced for you but do not have access to the uncompressed source video to edit and encode again as a compressed FLV video. You may wonder: I don't have the source video file, so how can I edit the FLV file I do have? When your non-profit organization does not have the original video to edit and then encode again as an FLV, in a pinch, you can use Moyea's Free FLV Editor Lite to edit your FLV flash-based video.

Where can you use this free Flash Editor? Some Suggestions:

        1. Trim an FLV video (cut off a date, remove an old logo; reducing the duration of an FLV video when the source video is not available to edit and encode again to an FLV video)
        2. Join two or more FLV videos, whether the FLV Video has been encoded with h263 [Flash 7], On2's VP6 codec [Flash 8] or H264 encoded video [which is Flash Player 9, Update 3 and newer]. Please note: up to five 5 files can be imported in the Free FLV Editor Lite application).
        3. Replace an audio track with an mp3 of your choosing by Unlinking the audio and video tracks, delete the audio track and import a different mp3 file.
        4. Extract the audio track of an FLV file: say you wanted to use the audio portion of your FLV video PSA as an audio ONLY PSA, then FLV Editor will allow you to export the audio as an MP3 file (Note: Only FLV container files with encoded with mp3 audio can be exported as an mp3 with FLV Lite Editor. Thus, for example, using the Free FLV Editor, the mp3 audio can not be exported from an H264 encoded video with AAC encoded audio (viewable with Adobe Flash Player 9, Update 3 (or newer); update 3 is specifically version 9,0,115,0.
        5. To add additional FLV Metadata, which is information about the video embedded in the video: For example, you could add the author or title of the video (on the tab where you click Metadata, you will note that the free FLV Editor application does not list current metadata embedded in the FLV). However, when an FLV file is imported, some metadata is shown, as follows:

• video: codec used (for example, an h263 encoded video would require at least Flash 7 to view in your browser), resolution (eg, 640x480), video duration and frames per second
• audio: codec used, bit rate, sampling and number of channels

So, when you do not have access to your original video to edit, the Free FLV Editor Lite may serve your purposes to re-work your FLV video file.

You can download the Free FLV Editor Lite application via the following URL:

http://RandyTyler.org/u/flv

After installing, bypass the pitch to upgrade to their paid version by clicking continue; also, as of late, Moyea seems to automatically launch your e-mail application with a prepared message, suggesting you pass on the news about their FLV editor.

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.

Microsoft Still Holds a Whopping 92.21 Percent of the Total OS Market; Mac OS Only 5.11 Percent

Based on current trends, it appears that Microsoft's dominant Operating System (OS) will be around for some time. According to a December 2009 report by Net Applications, Microsoft still commands a whopping 92.21 percent of the total OS market (see the table above). Interestingly, despite all the hype, the Mac OS only accounts for 5.11 percent of the total. Moreover, at 5.71 percent of the total, Microsoft's recently released Windows 7 alone edges out the Mac OS share. And even though Windows 7 launched with rave reviews, Windows XP still holds 67.77 percent of the total OS share.

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.

How to Easily Reveal Your Login Passwords with a Firefox Addon

Passwords used on Web-based log-ins are usually masked. Hence, when one can not see the actual characters, typing the correct password may require many attempts. However, the Firefox Addon "Show My Password" enables the user to quickly and easily reveal their passwords as shown in the screen capture above.

The Show My Password Firefox Addon is installed as follows:

• Visit: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8016
• Click the Green button "Add to Firefox"
• After installation is complete, restart Firefox
• After restart, Go to Tools, then Addons and Select "Show My Password"
• Click on options and select "enabled" and choose how you would like your passwords to be revealed (for example, on right click menu or after your  mouse hovers the password field) and hidden
• Works with Firefox 1.5 to 3.6.

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.

How to Easily Transfer Files Up to 2 GB for Free

Working with online volunteers often requires the transfer of large files exceeding the 10 MB to 25 MB e-mail attachment limit. Faced with the need to transfer a large file to an online volunteer, consider trying WeTransfer, a free Web-based file transfer service. Based in Amsterdam, WeTransfer allows easy transfer of your videos, music, photo albums or documents. This service, which does not require registration, allows files of up to two GB to be stored for up to two weeks and downloaded by up to 20 recipients. As a creative method to fund their service, rotating background image advertisements appear while files are being transferred.

To transfer a file using WeTransfer, visit https://www.wetransfer.com/

• Ensure JavaScript is enabled in your browser
• Ensure Flash 9.0.115 player or newer is installed (as files are currently transferred via a Flash interface)
• Check Your Flash Version: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/155/tn_15507.html
• Click the plus sign to add a file or files (two GB maximum) from your hard drive you want to send
• Enter the recipient's e-mail address (up to 20 comma-separated e-mail addresses can be added)
• Enter your (active) e-mail address
• Enter your desired message (identify the files you are transferring)
• Click the "Transfer" button (which uploads the files from your hard drive to WeTransfer's server)

If you are transferring files with sensitive information contained within, first encrypt your files (you can use a free open source application such as 7-Zip). To ensure a successful Web-based transfer, it may be advisable to split a large file into smaller pieces (such as 300 MB files), which can de easily done with 7-Zip, as well.

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.

How to Quickly Comment on a Blog Post by Enlarging the Text Area

Have you ever been frustrated trying to enter text into a small comment box? If the text area is too small, you may be required to scroll horizontally and vertically in order to see your input. FormTextResizer is a JavaScript-based bookmarklet which allows you to easily re-size most text areas and text-based fields.

How To Use FormTextResizer with Firefox:

• visit http://www.themaninblue.com/experiment/FormTextResizer/
• drag the bookmarket (Right-click here and "Bookmark" FormTextResize) to your Bookmarks Toolbar
• ensure JavaScript is enabled in your browser
• click on the "Form TextResize" boomarklet to activate
• click and drag on a text box (text area) or text field you would like to re-size

As well as re-sizing a blog comment box, field and text areas in forms can also be re-sized with this bookmarklet.

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.

How to Easily Tell How Many Characters You Have Entered in a Comment Text Box

Commenting on blog posts is one effective way for a non-profit organization to stay engaged and build community. However, when commenting on a blog post or a within a forum, the text area (text box) to respond may stipulate a maximum number of characters are allowed. But how to you know how many characters you have typed or pasted into a text box? Enter Character Count, a free bookmarklet.

When activated, the "Character Count' Bookmarklet provides you with the total number of characters entered in any text box as you type (see the screen capture above which shows that 215 characters of a maximum 500 have been entered in a blog post's comment text area; as you will note, the bookmarklet also shows the number of characters in the name and e-mail text fields). Installing is as easy as installing any other JavaScript-based bookmarklet.

First, visit Squarefree.com and then drag and drop the "character count" bookmarklet to your Bookmarks Toolbar (compatible with Mozila, Opera and Internet Explorer). Now when you come upon any text box stating your are only allowed a certain number of characters, first ensure you have JavaScript enabled in your browser. Then cick on the Character Count Bookmarklet to activate it and start typing. You aggregated character input will be visible as you type. Besides typing, the bookmarklet also provides you with a total character count if you copy and paste a selection of text into the text box. You can de-activate the bookmarklet by simply clicking on it again.

For further information about how a non profit organization can develop a productive virtual volunteering program through the use of appropriate technology, please visit this Online Volunteering Resource.