Join your fellow nonprofit techies and nominate your favorite useful website. Simply send the URL of your favorite website with a brief description of why you find it useful to wormer@rmu.edu. So far we have 28 of your favorite sites in the list below.

Nonprofit Technology
Techsoup, www.techsoup.org, is a valuable source of information and products for non profits. I've gotten a lot of help from their forums.

Summit Collaborative - Strategic Technology Toolkit - www.summitcollaborative.com/resources.html Articles, fact sheets, & tools to access, plan, implement, and evaluate technology in an organization. Great for technology planning and assessing the skill level of employees.

Nonprofit Management Library - www.managementhelp.org/infomgnt/infomgnt.htm The whole management library is a helpful index of links by management area. The Computers, Internet and the Web section is most relevant to this list of links.

Purchasing
CDW - www.cdw.com The key to CDW is to sign up for one of their extranet accounts. You get a dedicated team of professionals, an account manager who manages/oversees all of your purchases and quoting needs. Usually very fast service.

cnet - www.cnet.com A dependable source of product reviews that combines both expert reviews and user ratings. The site enables easy comparisons between products, and lists price ranges at online stores.

Security
The SANS Incident Center isc.incidents.org is a good place to feed your paranoia, stress and insecurity, and to provide entry into the main SANS site.

eicar - European Institute for Computer Anti-Virus Research www.eicar.org provides a test file for testing antivirus software.

System Administration (also see Troubleshooting)
www.sysinternals.com For some tools helpful for system administration of Windows systems including advanced utilities and technical information.

www.realvnc.com For remote system control, VNC (Virtual Network Computing) software makes it possible to view and fully-interact with one computer from any other computer or mobile device anywhere on the Internet

Troubleshooting (also see System Administration)
Annoyances.org www.annoyances.org can be helpful with Windows issues.

Experts Exchange - www.experts-exchange.com A wealth of information on fixes for IT problems, sharing problems and fixes, sometimes very technical but most often easy to understand. Often has solutions to problems in terms that are more coherent than answers in Microsoft Knowledge Base. There is a charge for the premium service (which you need for most of the answers).

For a Novell shop, Cool Solutions coolsolutions.com/forums/index.php is good.

Sysinfo.org, www.sysinfo.org/startupinfo.html has a good list of programs that may be running on your machine at start up, what they do and where they come from.

Tutorials and How-Tos
Geek Girls - www.geekgirls.com Plain English guides for common tasks. A great resource for end-users to use on their own. Helps tackle the fear factor that staff have about technology.

Microsoft Access Tutorials - mis.bus.sfu.ca/tutorials/MSAccess/tutorials_main.asp Great starting place for just starting Access or when you are just catching onto Access. Easy to use PDF files with lots of screenshots and directions. Note: This site can only be viewed with Internet Explorer

The Access Web - www.mvps.org/access The definitive site for the Microsoft Access developer community. It includes explanations of known bugs, downloadable code to enhance your database way beyond the wizards and lots of reference material on all areas of Access database development.

Microsoft Accessibility Features - Step-by-step Tutorials from the Disabled Women's Network of Ontario - dawn.thot.net/cd/181.html A resource on tutorials that walk you thru keyboard and mouse actions that make computers more accessible for individuals with disabilities. A lot of the tips can also be used for the everyday user who are looking to make tasks easier.

Internet Connectivity
Broadband Reports www.dslreports.com has information and forums about dsl providers.

DNSStuff dnsstuff.com has been helpful in finding some problems with the DNS of both our web site and our mail server.

www.dyndns.org/support is a commercial page, but it has a good low-tech explanation of DNS. From this page you can either go to a glossary of terms and jargon or go into their KnowledgeBase, which is where I found an explanation of glue records.

Websites and Web Hosting
WebHostingTalk www.webhostingtalk.com is a good place to find information, both unbiased and biased, about web hosting companies and issues.

Easily encode an e-mail address reference on a web page at automaticlabs.com/products/enkoderform. You create the html code to send email to a particular email address along with the title or graphic that you want displayed and paste it into a block on this web page. It returns Javascript that you would in turn paste into your live web page.

Jakob Nielsen is a leading authority on usability and web design. His web site, www.useit.com, is regularly updated with the latest opinion and analysis of what defines good, usable web design.

General
One of the most helpful websites for me is www.anywho.com. A very useful online directory to help find addresses, phone numbers, etc. I use this site daily.

A whole different way to look at search engine results is www.kartoo.com. It can't be explained. It must be experienced.

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine www.archive.org allows Internet users to access archived versions of websites back to 1996. If you're looking for information on a favorite website that no longer exists, try this free service.

One method of decreasing the potential for SPAM (unsolicited commercial e-mail) is to prevent the e-mail addresses posted on your site from being read by the e-mail spiders that crawl the web in search of e-mail addresses. www.inter-linked.com/content/spiderbait.php3