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Ajah, our Python powered interactive directory of funders for Canadian non-profits, was recently featured in Don Magazine. We've been in the local news before but the previous mentions were all were by the tech community. Don Magazine is a publication for non profits and it's rewarding to see that beyond the cool tech, the non-profit sector sees a real value in the service that we developed.
We just released theSector.ca, a tool to explore the Canadian charitable sector. In a nutshell, it's an interactive directory of charities that one can use to gain insight on individual charities as well as trends such as fundraising, staffing, and expenditures across the charitable sector.
We've already covered why we believe that it's going to shake the charitable sector and now I want to take a moment to celebrate the cool tech that allowed us to make it happen.
Both Fundtracker and theSector are TurboGears 2 applications running on top of a Postgres database. In Fundtracker, we achieved very good performance through fine tuning of Postgres and sprinkling bits of denormalized data here and there. Since you need a subscription to use Fundtracker, we can keep an eye on the growth and we feel safe from overnight scalability problems but theSector being a freely accessible tool, we had to make sure that it could handle a Twitter storm and our main tool to do that is systematic denormalization into a star schema.
Ajah, the startup I'm building with Mike, Nick, and Dan, is now online. Check it out: ajah.ca.
We spent a crazy evening proofreading and tuning the web-server to make sure that everything would be running smoothly for the launch. That was fun.
Only the static part of the site is public for now but the Fundtracker application is there in the same Paster instance and we have a group of analysts using it to copy edit our data and making sure that everything will be top-notch for the big launch.
Ajah Fundtracker is a TurboGears 2.1 application, our templating engine is Mako and even though we played with a few form generators, we ended preferring the raw Formencode encode approach. As long a you have a good text editor, it's really straight forward to code your forms by hand to we did just that.
In the back-end, we have a Postgres database and a Xapian full text search engine. The site runs inside a Paster instance behind mod_proxy, all running on a Linode VM.
We will open a limited beta in the coming week then soon after that, it's the big launch. I'm excited.