Donor Tools has a new home page – check it out!

I saw a great presentation about Git by Rein Henrichs at Austin on Rails the other night. I’ve heard a lot about Git, but based on what Rein said, I finally and decided to give Git a try. So far I have been extremely impressed. So impressed, in fact, that I’ve migrated the Donor Tools repository to Git, and I haven’t looked back since.

One of the best little benefits is the fact that Git only puts one .git folder at the top-level of your project, unlike Subversion, which litters every folder in your project with a .svn directory. Nice. I’m also loving the ability to branch and merge without tearing a whole in the space-time continuum.

Git takes a little getting used to. It was created by some extremely smart people (namely Linus Torvalds, who also created Linux), so the inner workings are completely beyond the scope of my comprehension. (Thanks for trying to explain it though Rein.) One of the toughest things to wrap my mind around is how to push and pull branches from remote repositories. But even baby steps with Git are more powerful than Subversion, so I’m really looking forward to becoming more experienced with Git.

With a little bit of fanfare, we recently announced Donor Tools, a new donor management app for non-profits.

I used to work at a small non-profit, and I was never satisfied with the software that was available to us. It all seemed either too hard to use, too clunky, too slow, or 20 years old. Ever since then I dreamed of making a killer app for non-profits – one that’s easy to use, has just a few features that every non-profit needs (and not a lot of extra features that only a few need), helps non-profits get to know their donors better, and is affordable.

We’ve been writing code for Donor Tools since July, and it’s exciting to watch it take shape. There’s still a lot to be done. If you’d like to keep an eye on the development progress, be sure to subscribe to the news feed.

Pretty soon we’ll need some beta testers. If you know of any nonprofit organizations that might be interested in helping us beta test, please invite them to subscribe to the mailing list on www.donortools.com

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