Salsa Scoop
Salsa Is Here: Get It Free With a DIA Empowers Grant
There was a star danced, and under that was I born. -Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing
Well, it's here, as you may have heard a few times. (Relive the announcement here if you must, on the Salsa updates blog.)
At some time today -- no one can say the hour or the place any more than the meaning -- Salsa became.
It's the end of the day. The party is already beginning to crank. It's been a devil of a ride, not that it's over yet, as the views into tool development (see here, here, here and here, and check back tomorrow [update: here] besides) indicate, though plenty of the hours logged are the unbloggable drudgery of bug-spotting and -swatting.
To mark the occasion, we're giving it away. No foolin' -- get a year's service on us, with no lock-in, hidden fees or other nasty surprises with a DIA Empowers Grant.
Even signups with our regular low-low, won't-be-undersold fees are taking it in the shorts: pocket $500 for beer money (or, if you're coming to the bash tonight, hangover remedy).
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07:27 PM Mar 15, 2007 -
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DIA Salsa Spotlight of the Day: Email, Tags and Scoring
The email blaster is by far our most-used tool. Since its inception it has, like many of the DIA tools, evolved organically. There are six separate steps to send an email blast and most of the steps seem to be just thrown in random order.Master Blaster
In the Salsa edition of the blaster we decided to follow a more logical approach and one that is more akin to composing and sending an email from your desktop email application. The number of steps has been reduced from six to three: Write, Target, Send.
In the first step, writing your email, we've combined the ability to choose a template, set the from fields and then compose the email. The new template chooser allows you to see a preview of your template than just having to rely on a name.
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11:55 AM Mar 15, 2007 -
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DIA Salsa Spotlight of the Day: Dashboards
Third in the series. Previously: Queries ReportsI want it MY way!
Yeah, yeah. We've heard you. All of you. You want your own, customized, slice of DIA heaven. You loathe having to share you preferences with others in your office.Sharing is not caring in your book. Instead you have a rugged sense of individualism. We know. You are a special and unique snowflake.
Well, we listened. Not only did we listen (and listen and listen and listen) but we did something about it. Salsa is about you. All about you. You and your needs. We can wait for our needs until our Guacamole release is ready.
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02:01 PM Mar 14, 2007 -
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E-xemplar: Distributed Event Action Lands Step It Up in Grey Lady
Very nice piece in the New York Times today on Step It Up 2007's National Day of Climate Action Apr. 14 and the general attempt to get lawmakers to take climate change seriously.
Step It Up is currently the gargantuan Distributed Event in the DIA universe, closing in on 1,000 separate local actions a month out from the action. (There's a short description of what the Meetup-like tool does on this page.)
And the seamless blending of online components with in-the-flesh activities testifies to the capacity for creative activism to inspire passion and get big in a hurry:
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09:41 AM Mar 14, 2007 -
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DIA Salsa Spotlight of the Day: Custom Reports
Long one of the DIA toolset's frustrating limitations, reports in Salsa -- flexible, customizable, savable -- put the copious data lodged in the system suddenly at your fingertips, not excluding visually relieving graphiness.Heck, maybe too much. In striking a balance between power and usability, we've had to introduce some fairly advanced concepts to the Report Builder interface, and they can take some getting used to. The query builder actually lets you construct a SQL statement, so users who are comfortable with the argot will be ahead of the game, but really, everyone can play.
Yesterday, Anthony toured the buffed-up Query tool for pulling a finely-targeted slice of the list. Today, we talk Reports for pulling finely-targeted everything else.
Reportee
Reports can actually do some of the things that queries do, but they do a whole lot more -- because they can be run on any data object in the system. Begone, export-to-Excel-and-figure-it-out! (Naturally, you can still do that too.)
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07:17 PM Mar 13, 2007 -
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