Newsletter for February 4th, 2008
Codename "The Winners' Circle"
1. Newsletter EditorialDarwin here welcoming you to the February 4th edition of the newsletter. We're highlighting threads from the past six weeks and anticipate this being a slightly longer than usual newsletter. It's been an exciting period since the last full newsletter with a huge software draw. Congratulations to all of
January's Software Draw winners.
There was a lot of press about our NANY 2008 programm challenge, including a
Nice little write-up of DonationCoder in usa today "tech_space" blog and other
press comments about the NANY 2008 challenge in InformationWeek, Lifehacker.com, and more. Find and Run Robor (FARR) was also mentioned in several prominent places recently, including
a nice mention in lifehacker.
2. Software Releases by DonationCoder.com MembersSome fun new releases by members on our site in the recent weeks, including a bunch of FARR plugins, and a really fun and challenging puzzle game called
Deductoid by member timns.
3. February Discounts and GiveawaysThis month we are focusing on the products of
Metaproducts.com, who make a variety of truly excellent programs. Mouser says that several of their programs are at the top of their respective classes, and he recommends Offline Explorer, Mass Downloader, and Startup Organizer, among others. We have 33% discounts on all of their programs, plus we're giving away one of each on February 14th.
We had a TON of discounts in January and some of them are still active for another few days; and due to late posting in January, the following discounts are running through February: xplorer^2, SyncBackSE, and PerfectDisk Pro. So check out the
Specials Page before these offers expire.
All of these applications are available in February's draw, so if you haven't won anything recently visit the specials page and enter to win!
4. Your input requestedA warm welcome to all the members that have joined over the last six weeks. In the fall of 2007 we reached a milestone 100,000 members. We've added almost 10,000 more since that time! We're looking forward to interacting with as many of you as possible on the forum. If you haven't already introduced yourself, please post a brief note on the
OK - lets get to know each other... who are you, what do you do, where from? board. You'll find Donationcoder to be a welcoming community. Also visit the following threads, we'd love to see your participation in them:
5. Mini-Reviews by MembersMini-reviews are a great resource for people researching software solutions and may be found on a dedicated
Mini-Review Board. A bunch of new mini-reviews have been posted recently. Please remember to acknowledge the efforts of the reviewers with a few donationcredits if you find their reviews interesting and/or helpful.
6. Living RoomJ-Mac wrote an interesting post about the modern office and the problems associated with our power and port hungry peripherals -
Power and Ports - The Ever Diminishing Resources in My Office! He received a number of responses and suggestions. How do YOU deal with this increasingly irritating issue?
7. Fun and LeisureEver bang your head against a wall trying to remember the name of your favourite TSR-80 game? Relief is in sight.
Find names for old games... 8. General Software DiscussionOnce again the General Software Discussion board has seen an enormous amount of activity over the past six weeks.
9. Specific Software DiscussionsPostings made to the General Software Discussion board often relate to specific applications. Here are some highlights.
10. Software Advice and Solutions RequestedThe General Software board receives a LOT of posts, everything from pointers to web content discussing the software industry to people posting with their experiences with particular software applications, good and bad. Often people post asking for opinions about specific software or categories of software. A recent thread saw mouser asking
What's the best program for cooking and recipe management? Two other threads request advice on
Dealing with spam and
Spam filtering.
11. Coding SnacksIf you're looking for a software solution and can't find anything that quite fits your requirements, why not post a coding snack request? Donationcoder has lots of expert and willing coders who might just find your request interesting enough to take on. Frequently, someone will post a link to an existing solution to your request. For an example check out the discussion surrounding FreewareFan's
IDEA: Program to print 4 small text files as one page, 4-up.
Read on for some more examples of recent requests, the solutions suggested, and the coding snacks completed:
12. Developer's CornerThe Developer's Corner section of the forum is not *just* for developers! For example, mahesh2k compares three of (the four) mainstream webbrowsers and asks if developers should
Bow to the browser? The thread becomes an interesting discussion of web browsers in general. Well worth a read by anyone who is "on-line".
13. Member Site SpotlightI'm pleased to highlight sri's new webpage in this newsletter. He offers "tutorials for web masters on how to install PHP scripts and also link to/aggregate useful how-tos on all topics like Technology, Health, Lifestyle, Cooking from other web sites around the internet." A little something for everyone and all presented with a clean, economical front-end that makes browsing and reading a pleasure. Visit Sri at
Sri's How To Tuts.
14. Thank youThat's it for the February 4th edition of the newsletter. Thank you to the entire Donationcoder community for your participation and a BIG "thank you" to both mouser and jgpaiva, who provided much needed proofreading and LOTS of advice about the content of this newsletter.
