I’ve been so busy hacking and hustling that I haven;t had much any time to update here, but after a day and a half, we’ve made great progress.

We have a four person team building Invest Your Heart.

InvestYourHeart is a collaborative social change investment platform for people who believe:

What’s in your heart is just as valuable as what’s in your wallet.
InvestYourHeart creates an opportunity for heartful, conscious, intentional giving to causes you care about.  Each time you invest, you’ll be invited to share what’s in your heart while you’re making the investment by creating a “heartspace”.  These “heartspaces” will be visually displayed on the landing page, and contributors will be able to offer them as virtual gifts to friends and family by designating a contribution in their honor.

We’re all in this together.
Instead of initiating separate, independent fundraising & social action campaigns for each project on the site, instead, we’ll mount themed campaigns in which like-minded nonprofits may participate as affiliates.   By collaborating common campaigns, we can achieve critical mass that attracts more visibility and resources to all participating projects.

Funding is just the beginning.
So often, crowdfunding sites encourage attention to a project ony until it’s been funded.  At InvestYourHeart, we know funding is only the beginning, and we know people who have invested their hearts in your efforts are interested in more than seeing a fundraising goal met.  We provide unique opportunities to interact online with the people & communities that are transformed through our collaborative investments and provide ongoing updates so you can see the love you’ve manifested in the world, not just the money you’ve helped to raise.

As expected, we have a Facebook Page and twitter account set up.

I’ve decided to break out of some ruts and join the StartupBus (@startupbusfl), a 3 day moving hackathon on a bus to Austin, TX for South by Southwest Interactive (SxSWi).

I’ll be posting a whole lot more about it as I go along, so I’ll start here with just the list of things that I’m packing to bring along (aside form the obvious tech):

1. Sketchpad
2. Dry-erase markers
3. Post-its
4. Headphones
5. My Ideas To Pitch
6. Luna Bars
7. MyPressi Portable Espresso Machine
8. Upgraded Coffee
9. 100GB of music
10. Pre-built Rails application skeleton (I’ll tell you about that in another post. soon!)

Thanks to this tutorial, I was able to upgrade my Mac Mini media server to 3GB of RAM. That allowed me to upgrade it to Mac OS X Lion as well (it only had 1GB before, and Lion requires 2GB). That’s made quite an improvement in file sharing responsiveness. If you recall, even on Snow Leopard, it could take 30 seconds to connect to a server. Initially, I had tried to use the DIMMs left over form my MacBook Pro upgrade (to 8GB), but they were too advanced. Luckily, I had an old white MacBook in the closet with a bad motherboard which happened to have matching DIMMs, so I was able to complete the upgrade.

While developing the InnerLightTools application on my local machine, I’m using the Pow web/rack server. It’s a great way to run rails apps locally. At the same time I’m working on WordPress development locally as well, and for that I need Apache. By default Pow runs on port 80, just like Apache, so I couldn’t do both at the same time. Initially I set Apache to run on a different port, but discovered the WordPress Multisite won’t run on ports other than 80 and 443. So, I found the Pow configuration page contained information about setting Pow to run on an alternate port. It’s pretty simple, just add

export POW_DST_PORT=<any port num>

to your ~/.powconfig file and restart. My Pow is finicky, so I often have to reinstall it to get things to work properly. Fortunatley that’s trivial with the Powder gem.

I haven’t gotten much done on Inner Light Tools on the last few months. My day job had taken over all of my free time, at the same time, I was waiting for Rails 3.1 to finish up. I’d begun converting the code over with one of the early Release Candidates, but when I updated my MacBook to Lion, things broke. At the same time I’d tried renaming the Xcode directory, and then make and gcc stopped working. Even when I moved the folder back they wouldn’t work.

Because I couldn’t compile any native code, the upgrade to rails 3.1 final would’t work. I couldn’t get Xcode to reinstall from the App Store either. So I reinstalled it on another machine, and made a copy of the installer before it was finished (when it gets deleted). With that I was able to reinstall, and everything started working again, thankfully.

Now that I had a final version of Rails. I could get on with the code. Over the weekend I spent some time deleting parts of the app. Originally I’d planned to allow users to build customized intake forms, but dealing with all the complexity that brought was driving me nuts, and taking forever to code. So I’ve cut it out, and it’s not just a simple model.

I may go back to that idea in the future, if my users actually want that kind of thing. I’ll ask them first.

Also, I’m trying out WordPress clients, trying to decide between MarsEdit and MacJournal. I’ll let you know which one wins.