John Croson's Blog Home

I needed a method to collect donations from patrons to the museum website that involved something a little less that what we offered before, PayPal. Not that I don't like the idea of PayPal, mind you, but it requires that the user create an account if they haven't got one, and that is a pain in the ass. So since I finished our OSC shopping cart for the Online Museum Store , we already had the mechanism in place. SSL certs, Authorize.net account, etc. Found a nice sample script at Zend.com that got me started. It was very simple, and I needed to get more from it. This is what I ended up with. First, a file called donate.php, that contains the form, and passes vars to the processing file, auth.php. Here are the files . Hope they help someone. JC

...it's here. Now to just find a way to get folks to find it and use it... JC

Woohoo! My sourceforge submission of the museum collection management database was accepted. No to throw a website together to draw some attention to it...

One of my tasks was to set up a Campaign office in downtown Racine, to house our Development Office. Their primary role was to raise money for the new Racine Art Museum. I set up SBC DSL, small office package for the connection to the web. Parked a Linux firewall/file-server/proxy server in front of the workstations to protect them from the baddies ;-). It was an old 233mhz machine I picked up for change, and worked like a champ. I bullet-proofed it with scripts and tutorials from Dranch and his work with TrinityOS. Great job David! I also use Tripwire , a great project. I needed to provide some sort of method to provide these users access to our file server at our main office, where we were being supplied with SBS DSL, but this time the service came with a 5 port router, and all external IP's were NAT'd to internal addresses in the router. I wanted to use FreeS/WAN , but I was having too much trouble punching a hole through the router, so I used SSH and Samba. I setup a co

We use My Survey MySQL to record visitors to the museum. Unfortunately, My Survey records to the exact second each entry is recorded. We also chose to record zip codes for each visitor. That posed an interesting problem, since My Survey simply sorts the data as input, giving us no way to display by month, or sort the zip codes by state, unless mucho hacking took place, and I'm no perl dude... Since our Development Director along with the Marketing Commitee needed a more resonable way to view this, I decided to use Excel and VBA. My Survey allows the user to export a csv file, so the following code works like a champ in a code module for Excel: Option Explicit Dim intRow As Integer, sCol As String, rRange As String Dim szFilter As String Dim szTitle As String Dim szFile As String, intReturn As Integer, intCount As Integer, blnFilled As Boolean Sub SelectCSV() szFilter = "Survey Files (*.csv),*.csv" szTitle = "Please Select a survey File&

Click here to view it.

This was a thing that I eagerly enjoyed. I got to play around with updating our web site (this link goes to an archive), finding ways to make it easier to keep current, etc. PHP played a good part in that, and is even more so now. It occurred to me that we needed to keep news releases up to date, so I created a WebDav resource on the Apache server that allowed our marketing director to log in and deposit files into folders that were categorized by month/year. When the browser points to that directory, the index file uses the opendir method provided by PHP and populates the page with nicely formatted contents. I also added RSS feeds to that same area of the web. I figured if our news wasn't so dynamic, at least the RSS would add something to it. I did something similar to our current situation at RAM. Since our webserver and fileserver sit on the same Linux box, I just created a symlink to our news directory in the marketing persons personal share. Now all she has to do is

Letting one another know what you were doing at any given time was another issue for us at Wustum. There are a number of employees that need to leave the building for various reasons, and instead of putting up a In/Out board, I decided that web-based calendaring was in order. Our friends at M$ do make a nice add-on to Exchange 5.5 called Team Folders. Unfortunately, they don't seem to be supporting it any longer, so get it while you can. It allows all your Outlook users to view a common calendar, much like thier own personal one. It supports permissions, and is fully customizable. I set up another one to track our many classrooms that we use for education. It eliminated double-booking issues. When we opened the new Racine Art Museum , I had to address the same issues on two campuses and viewing abilities across the internet. That was easily solved using GNU licensed tools. One is called WebCalendar for employee tracking, and the other is Meeting Room Booking System . We

Another thing I wanted to add to the effeciency of the workplace there was a database to collect information about our permanent collection and our sales/rental gallery. All of the information for the permanent collection was stored in a FileMaker Pro spreadsheet, and sales/rental items were tracked by paper... Unfortunately for the museum, the person that handled the sales/rental area left them, and in doing so took all the information that was in her head about that area. It was really pretty scary, having all that artwork, and needing to somehow come up with a system to track it's arrival, rental or sale, or even return to the artist. What I did was use the NorthWind database example from M$ Access and hacked it up to satisfy our needs. I used quite a bit of error checking on the input of data, really putting some tight reigns on that. I didn't want the data entry to become tainted. Some of the fine points are these: All the artists that exist in the DB have related ob

I'd been working at the Wustum Museum for a couple of months when I started noticing what I would call an inefficient use of users time spent doing daily tasks. The biggest problem to tackle was the "Mailing List From Hell". They were using FileMaker Pro for years with their old Mac LCII's and since the systems weren't networked, there were multiple copies of many lists floating all over the place... Once the PC's were put in by my predecessor, the lists were "somewhat" consolodated, but there were those that just couldn't relinquish control. The real problem was to collect all of them, remove them from the users computers, mesh them together, and send them in to our mailing guru that found duplicates, updated addresses, etc. It was a real mess, and took some time to fix, but now we have a pretty clean list of 10,000 + names, and a fund raising program called Paradigm to manage it and other things. Now we all use the DB, and no more multi

So I start at Wustum Museum as Techology Operations Manager. What a mess. The woman that set up the system used a local company that installed a leased system for them. Bad business decision, and even worse setup. SBS from M$ (I'm not a lover of M$, but they have their place). No patches in place, no connection to the internet except for dial up to an ISP that has a collection of mail boxes that they connect to at specific periods. Lame. I convinced them to allow me to turn the mail accounts off, get DSL and set up Exchange 5.5 to do what is was supposed to do, serve mail. Shortly thereafter, I set up a RedHat box on an old Acer 233mhz box that served as our firewall and web server. Still works to this day, even after I set up a chroot'ed caching DNS server, SMB (just to transfer backups to the M$ box from the RAM site), Webmin, SSH, and even MRTG. WOW that's a big load for a little box. I love this stuff.

I've decided that I should document what I've been doing in my position at the Racine Art Museum these past couple of years. I've taken on a number of projects, and while I should have done this progressively as I performed them, I'll try to do it now. My interest in computers started long ago, when I joined the Army. I wanted a job that involved computers, and they were happy to oblige me. Unfortunately, I knew nothing about computers, only that I wanted to play...so they assigned me as a 13E MOS. Field Artilliary Fire Direction Specialist. The only computer they had was FADAC, or "Freddy". It computed the trajectory of bullets for us when we were too lazy to do it on paper and using protractors and slide rules. And I hate math... Once I got out of the service and finally ended up at Rode's Camera some years later, I started going to school, puttering around with machines at home (Alpha server, PC's, Mac's, Linux, etc) and learning lots. I

Woke up this A.M. to edit some of my wedding video and run some tests on output. I decided that I needed to open a browser to my WebMin interface on my firewall/webserver here at home to whip up a quick file repository that my siblings and friends could navigate to and view my latest "creations". What did my eyes behold...but a Blog option suddenly appeared in my trusty Google search bar! Now that is a nice thing to wake up to. Now I can journal my daily routines and put the masses to sleep...