Newsletter for June 29th, 2009 - Codename "Baby Cody is Born"

1. Newsletter Editorial - Part One

Greetings everyone.  It's been over 30 days since the last newsletter went out -- with all this summer heat it seems that we've slipped back into the once-a-month newsletter habit.  We will try hard to get back to releasing the newsletter twice a month so that we don't have such a hard time figuring out what items to leave out of each edition.

For this edition there are a bunch of fun things to tell you about.  First of all, those of you familiar with the DonationCoder website will know that we have a little bird/duck mascot named Cody (designed by DC member and artist Nick Pearson), who can be seen all over the site.  This month we commissioned another artist, who goes by the name of OneTrueTree and shows her work on the Etsy.com website, to create a "plushie" (teddy bear type doll) of Cody, and so was born.. Baby Cody!  He is extremely cute (see pictures below) and fun to hold.  Rather than keep him caged up in my house (especially in the Midwest where it's blisteringly hot) -- we're going to send him around the globe using a site that has been mentioned on DC in the past: ToyVoyagers.com.  Basically, the creature has his own web page and people can volunteer to host him and take him along on their adventures before passing him along to the next host.  Even we speak he is winging his way across the Atlantic to England to visit Nick (nudone).  After that he may make a tour of England and then head off to the Orient.  Wish him luck -- and if you want to host him for a visit, just make a post on that thread and get in line!


2. Newsletter Editorial - Part Two

Next up.. Monkeys.  Back in February of 2008, longtime DC member Ampa (Rob Fisher) made a post on the forum asking for people who might be willing to play test a board game he had been working on.  It was just a printable sheet of pieces and some brief instructions.  Fast forward to June 2009.. and the game has actually been published, looks beautiful, and is a big hit(!)  It's really exciting to see a project come to fruition like this, and I hope we will continue to share in these kinds of journeys.  To celebrate the success of the game, Rob is going to let us give away a copy of the game to one lucky DC member -- so make sure you check out this month's giveaway and enter to win a copy.

Lastly, I'm thrilled to announce that DC member Hamradio (Carroll Dearstone) has finally completed what I consider to be one of the holy grails of plugins for my Find and Run Robot (FARR) application.  If you've been waiting for an excuse to try FARR, this would be a good time to do it.  His plugin, aptly titled "hamNotes", is basically a minimalistic note taking tool that uses FARR to perform note addition and most importantly instant search as you type.  While there are a lot of really excellent and powerful note taking tools, many of us just want something really simple that is always available and that lets us *instantly* add new notes and find existing notes when we need them, with no muss or fuss.  HamNotes fills this role perfectly.  There are features for keyword tagging and you can edit, print, and delete notes, etc.  Most important is how efficiently you can add and find notes, so that it becomes second nature and you don't get distracted in the process.  The notes are stored in a clean xml plaintext file so you can easily import and export them to and from other programs.  Great, great stuff.  Please do consider sending hamradio some donationcredits if you find the plugin useful.