El Paso-area digital news, trends, innovations
Website makes finding the closest early voting site in El Paso easy
Thanks to the folks over at Impulse Development, El Pasoans are just a click away from finding the nearest early voting location on their mobile device or desktop computer.
Impulse has launched ElPasoEarlyVoting.com, which lists all the early voting locations in the county. Mobile device users who get a sudden urge to vote as they go about town just need to allow the site to determine their location and it will deliver the directions to the closest polling spot. The page also includes the early voting site’s hours and map link.
You can also find the closest spot through your home computer, too.
The site is a great example of community service by a web developer using their skills for good. Impulse’s owner Brandon Silverstein was profiled in an earlier Digitalegre Blog post here.
Early voting runs through Saturday, Nov. 2.
Why El Paso-area non-profits need social media in their revenue plans
If you work for a non-profit in El Paso and Southern New Mexico and don’t think you can afford the time to use social media, you should know the truth is you can’t afford not to when it comes to getting donors to take action. A new report from charity monitor GuideStar reveals the types of information donors want from a non-profit organization including:
- >The financial picture, including how an organization spends its money
- >That a nonprofit is legitimate
- >The basics of the organization—its mission, approach, and make up
- >The breadth and depth of the cause
- >The nonprofit’s impact
“Some of the information donors want, such as financials, is fairly easy to come by,” the report More Money for Good says. “In fact, donors state they are able to find each of the first four items on the list without much difficulty.”
The obstacle for donors comes with not knowing the non-profit’s impact. They want to know about more than a list of programs being offered. They want to hear the organization’s story to make sure their dollars are going to make a difference. Photos from an annual event posted on your website aren’t going to cut it.
Solar Aztec calendar pavilion also charging station for mobile devices in El Paso
Courtesy El Paso city solar projects site
Long known as “The Sun City,” El Paso is starting to realize the power of its fair weather blessing as more than a tourism slogan. The El Paso Times reports the city today dedicated its new solar-powered performance pavilion and public charging station Downtown.
Courtesy El Paso city solar projects site
The pavilion, at 605 N. Santa Fe Street, according to the city’s solar project’s website” is a shaded yet light-filled gathering and performance space with an elaborate detailed ceiling, paying homage to the original Aztec calendar and casting light play onto the ground below.
The pavilion has AC power outlets for public use and ” includes the ability to feed unused solar energy back into the City’s power grid as well as a means for the public to view metrics on solar use and collection.”
The pavilion is the latest in a series of solar projects the city is implementing. The lighting at the long-term parking lot at the airport was converted to solar in 2010, city pools are converting to solar heating and plans are being made for the main library to be equipped with a solar energy system. Read more about it on the city site here.
If you’d like to stop by the pavilion to power up or check out the sun art, here’s the map.
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Las Cruces newspaper’s Facebook art has fun with football rivalry and scores social media shares
Here’s a fun and effective use of art on Facebook by the Las Cruces Sun-News promoting the newspaper’s coverage of the upcoming UNM vs NMSU game.
Adding the arrow makes it appealing for New Mexico State University fans to share the art on their own status updates and spread their school pride. Note the clever bubble in the upper right corner telling readers where they can send gameday photos.
Within just a few hours of posting this it was shared 24 times and got 42 likes. What was your most-shared post?
Bilingual digital showcase translates into jobs for journalism students
It took a few digital platforms before UT El Paso-based Borderzine.com found success in its mission to inform and employ, said Webmaster Lourdes Cueva Chacón.
“We started with 50 unique visitors a month,” Cueva Chacón said of the website that first launched in December 2008. “We are now around 20,000 a month.”
Senior journalism lecturer and Borderzine.com director Zita Arocha told the Columbia Journalism Review in a May interview that the program was founded with two goals: “One is to tell the unreported stories of the [U.S.-Mexico] border region, which mainstream media doesn’t do very well,” Arocha said. The second was to give young Latino journalists “a leg up so that they can move into media positions throughout the country, and help create some diversity within news media.”
Now the project, which is a unique hybrid of university class and online publication, has received national recognition by journalism organizations and has helped El Paso students get internships and full-time jobs in newsrooms across the country.
Photo courtesy Lourdes Cueva Chacon
But finding the right platform for Borderzine took some experimenting. They started with iWeb, a website creation tool from Apple. That worked well enough for individual posts, but wasn’t good for a multiple user enterprise that could showcase students, said Cueva Chacón, who received her master’s degree in information science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was brought on to the Borderzine project for her expertise in usability, information architecture and interface design.
Hewlett-Packard finding steady tech labor pool in El Paso
Hewlett-Packard is celebrating a newly renovated 60,000 square-foot building, an expanding tech workforce in El Paso and looking forward to continued success on the border, according to today’s El Paso Times.
The Times’ Vic Kolenc reports the El Paso facility, one of three software application delivery centers HP operates in the United States, already employs several hundred technology professionals and plans to continue hiring sofware engineers, developers, testing specialists and other technology professionals well into next year.
“We have a long time before we tap out the (El Paso area labor) market,” Maryanne Faschan, director of HP’s Applications Management Services for the company’s Americas region, told the Times.
Read all the details in the full article here: http://www.elpasotimes.com/business/ci_21412767/hewlett-packard-fetes-west-el-paso-expansion-still-hiring
Borderland Bloggers Meetup set for Aug.27 in El Paso
You are not alone. Get together with other bloggers from El Paso, Southern New Mexico and Juarez in a casual gathering to share ideas and help promote El Paso-area blogging and readership.
This month’s meeting will be at 6 p.m. Monday, Aug. 27, 2012 at The Den / The Room in El Paso.
RSVP at http://www.meetup.com/BorderlandBloggers/events/77926832/
Brandon Silverstein: Making the web work in El Paso
Brandon Silverstein, owner of Impulse Development
Brandon Silverstein could have left El Paso with his computer science degree from UTEP in 2004, but he predicted his hometown was on the verge of offering greater career opportunities to someone with digital skills and a strong local network.
“I chose to stay in El Paso because it was the perfect place to start my own business,” said Silverstein, 30, the owner of website building company Impulse Development. “I had numerous friends, family, and business colleagues that formed a network that was crucial to finding business and getting started six years ago. I have no regrets staying here.”
Right out of college Silverstein had the classic comp sci job offer – the coding gig with a major data company that would put him in a cubicle on the programming assembly line. But, even though it was a practical career option, it didn’t seem like a good fit to the creative Franklin High grad who taught himself to build websites back in middle school and was fascinated by design.
“It was going to be very, very boring,” said Silverstein.
Instead, he took an opportunity to work at Stanton Street, a pioneer company in the El Paso web design and website development community. And less than two years later, Silverstein decided to launch his own web development company in El Paso, Impulse Development. He was joined there by web developer Andrew Hite.
“I was 24 at the time and didn’t have a mortgage. Wasn’t married. No kids. So it was the perfect time to try it,” said Silverstein, who thinks he would likely have ended up on more of a project management / supervisory path had he stayed at Stanton Street.
Now, six years after launching Impulse and building his own team, Silverstein continues to be hands on with a lot of the web designing and programming he likes.
“It’s still fun for me to do that,” he said.
Silverstein’s passion for keeping a hand in his work drives him to stay up to date on design trends and usability standards. He often teams with Armando Alvarez from boutique design firm Viva Creative Group, with whom Impulse shares office space and support staff. Silverstein cultivates his craft through collaboration, observation and conferences. His most recent trip to An Event Apart, the sold-out Austin coding conference of web industry stars, offered inspiration for new tools and techniques as well as reinforced Impulse Development’s guiding principle to create good user experiences.
El Paso Moments: Fourth of July neighborhood parade
Across the United States the Fourth of July is celebrated with fireworks, parades, music and lots of flag waving from large stadiums to small backyard cookouts. And while the large concerts and fireworks shows are awesome, there’s something uniquely special about the way families and neighbors take to the street with star-spangled bikes, costumed pets, decorated wagons and roofless cars to wave to each other and then gather in the local park for popsicles and a group pledge of allegiance.
How fun it was to capture El Paso’s Rim Area Neighborhood Association’s 15th annual parade and party on the scenic roadway that overlooks the border of the United States and Mexico!
Tomorrow’s news today
This item, recently shared on Facebook by a New Mexico journalist, helps illustrate our new expectations for communication in the digital age. The exchange is between a customer and Syl, a circulation rep:
Customer: “May I have today’s paper?”
Syl: “Sure!”
Customer: “And can I also have tomorrow’s as well?”
Syl: “I don’t have tomorrow’s yet, not until tomorrow.”
Customer: (In a disappointed voice): “Oh, you don’t?”
The customer may be even more disappointed to find out that “today’s” paper is actually yesterday’s news because most newspapers are scheduled to hit the press before midnight. We used to call it The 24-hour Miracle – marveling at the compressed amount of time we had to gather, write, edit, layout, process and then print pages and pages of fresh information and get it to the readers’ doorsteps before sunrise for less than the cost of a cup of coffee. Then we’d do it all over again the next day – a frenetic, full-on sprint to the next set of deadlines.
Now that process seems glacial. People carry phones and tablets that update instantly when news hits the web. Our friends and family have become publishers on social media. We expect real time coverage of public events as soon as we hear about them. Is it any surprise, then, that readers are now starting to expect us to predict the future?
Might be why the Miami Herald turned to The Amazing Kreskin for Tomorrow’s News Today an annual feature of Kreskin’s predictions for the future along with a scorecard on how he fared in earlier predictions. Maybe we should move the horoscopes out to the front page?
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