Archive for the 'Website' Category

Your donations at work

Published April 19, 2009 Medical Bills , Website 1 Comment
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Hello friends,

I’ve spent some time over the past week reconciling the donations and medical expenses. Your contributions have been extremely helpful, and as promised, have only gone to expenses related to Geraldine’s ongoing battle with this disease.

The donation tracker was a bit off from the last time that we had it live.  It had recorded about $7100 in donations directly from the site. However, after reconciling this, I found that it the actual records in Paypal added up to about $6700.  Some folks had problems with the Paypal interface and tried to donate multiple times, which inflated the numbers in the tracker by a small amount.  Paypal also charges fees for processing these transactions, so about $6500 went directly to the bank account that has been set up for this site.

Geraldine has paid around $8200 in expenses related to her treatment. However, there were also other donations that people made by check or to her family directly. These were immediately deposited into the same bank account. So, as a result of all of you who donated via the site or otherwise, her expenses have been completely covered.  I can tell you that this has been a huge relief to a woman that has been placed on disability, but would rather be working and cancer-free.

Bills are still trickling in, but there is still money left over to cover them.  There’s also a possibility that some expenses may be reimbursed by the insurance company. That money will go right back into the donation pool.

Once this process is complete and she hopefully makes the recovery that we all hope for, the remainder of any of these donations will be given to another person or group in need.

As of right now we won’t be bringing the donation utilities back online until we have some kinks worked out.  There may not be a need for further donations anyway, so if we do re-launch it, we would likely do so only to test the functionality for future cancer bloggers.

Funny characters, missing pictures

Published April 19, 2009 Website Leave a Comment
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Some of you may have noticed that when we rebuilt the site, some strange symbols appeared inside the text of some posts and comments.  This is because of character encoding and decoding when we retrieved the MySQL database back up.  I won’t bore you with details, other than to say I’ve gone through all posts and removed these manually.  If I’ve missed some, please let me know.

I have not cleaned up past comments yet.  Some of these are in en Français. I am too much of a novice at speaking/writing French to successfully edit these, but perhaps Geraldine will be able to help at a later date.

Most pictures have been replaced.  There were a few missing, but google had thumbnails of them. Categories and tags have been reassigned, mostly from memory.

All in all, I’d say that rebuilding the site is complete now.  I’ve backed it up again, but as stated before, it is very hard to back up in a single location.  You can back up the pieces, but the whole thing takes time to put back together. 

Thanks for your patience.

Progress

Published March 31, 2009 Website Leave a Comment
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We’re close to having the site rebuilt.  As you can see, the theme is back, along with the header, layout and some images.  Thanks to Google’s wonderful ability to cache almost anything, I’ve been able to recover the “About” page and a few images that I was missing.  I’ve uploaded a lot of the images that I personally had saved, and am trying to track down a few stragglers.  It will take a while to get these images back into the posts that they belong to.  Most of the posts have been cleaned up with categories and tags applied. These categories and tags look a bit different before because I was going from memory.  The posts and comments and pages have not had their content changed in the slightest, so at least we have that going for us.  Geraldine should be posting again soon.

The donation widget and tracker will remain offline for a while.  While we do have the code for it, it will take a significant amount of work to get it back online as the site is now in a different location (note the .com instead of .org address.)  We also have plans to release the code to the public as a free, open-source offering. We’d like to make it easy for other people that may be going through times like this to set up a non-profit site such as this one.  Please bear with us, we want to get this right before we re-launch donations again.

We’re back!

Published March 20, 2009 History , Website 7 Comments
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For the past week, a friend has been helping us work with the backup database for FoG.  Now we have it all back and hosted on a different server. We really just wanted to make sure that we could get to all of the posts and comments as soon as possible.

MANY thanks to my friend Tom Wilk. He doesn’t know Geraldine very well, but when he heard what happened, he jumped in the thick of things to get the database restored.

As you can see, the pictures are gone and the formatting looks a bit funky in places, but we do have all of the raw data back.  With some cleanup and design elements back in place, we’ll be good to go in no time.

Rebuilding the site

Published March 15, 2009 History , Website Closed
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This post was from the temporary blog at http://friendsofgeraldine. wordpress.com

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Hello, friends.

I want to bring you up to speed on what has happened to the site FriendsofGeraldine.org and let you know what our plan is moving forward.

First let me say that the amount of questions and comments that I’ve received have really surprised me.  I knew that a large group of people supported Geraldine, but I had no idea how many people would notice any changes to the site so quickly.  Thanks for your support of this website.

Now to address some commonly asked questions:

What happened to the site? We host the site on a friend’s server.  His account was hacked into and they deleted everything, including this site and his entire portfolio (he’s a full time freelance web developer – http://www.littlerobothead.com)

Who did this? That is unclear at this time.  It could have been a random attack.  However, the night that it was destroyed I received a couple of anonymous, harassing emails from someone using a gmail account called shouldbemorecareful@gmail.com. They deleted the account that night, however, rarely are email addresses or the computers that use them untraceable. And they unknowingly left one detail in the source code of their email that clearly identified them. I won’t be going into details, but I will share this with the authorities as they investigate this case.   Still, the attack may be unrelated and completely random.  We’ll leave that to law enforcement to figure out.

Did you backup the site? Not entirely.  Three of us worked to build this site, and each of us have different pieces in our hands.  That is just to rebuild the framework and design of the site, including features such as donation and donation tracker widgets.  As I believe I posted in an early entry for FriendsofGeraldine.org, we had plans to release the entire template as a free, open-source package for other folks to be able to create their sites for non-profit fund-raising. As Geraldine’s transplants approached, we all became more focused on helping her through that.  We had plans to work on the template later this year.  As for the posts, those were written on the server only.  There’s a database that allows you to save all of your posts and comments and links and any other pieces of information from any browser, computer, or location – with multiple contributors.  This is what makes blogs so effective for telling a story.  I’ve been told by the hosting company that I can purchase a backup copy of the database from them to restore all of this.  I’m working to get this all back online ASAP.  I will keep you posted.  We may not have lost anything! 🙂

Have you tracked down the person responsible? We’re working on it.  Because I have to work through another person (I don’t own the hosting account) it tends to slow things down.  Our friend that hosts the site had his entire livelihood temporarily destroyed in the process.  He is working to put the stuff that he pays his bills with back together first.  I can’t blame him.  In the end, all sites will be restored, his and ours.  We just need to be a little patient in the meantime.

Who would do something like this? As I said before, it could have been a random occurrence. It could also have been related to the harassing anonymous emails that I received that night.  Hackers tend to break into sites and just alter them slightly.  Most of the time they leave a nickname or handle as a calling card in order to show their friends that they did it.  Hackers don’t usually delete entire servers and sites.  To us, this seems personal, but we’ll leave it to the authorities to handle.   Hosting companies and law enforcement have ways to easily track down a person that does this sort of thing.  It will just take time.

Why would they do something like this? There’s a lot going on in Geraldine’s life.  This blog isn’t the place to talk about it.  This blog is only about keeping a record of her fight with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, bone marrow transplants, hospitals, insurance companies, etc.  We really don’t want to go anywhere else with this site.  So, we won’t go into details on why.  I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again.  Nothing will keep this story from being told. Nothing will keep this site down. 🙂

What happens now? Now we rebuild. I hope to have the database recovered within a week.  The design of the site will come together about the same time.  We will relaunch, comments and all, very soon.  Stay tuned.

Friends of Geraldine is down

Published March 13, 2009 History , Website Closed
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This is what we posted on FriendsofGeraldine.org after the site was destroyed

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Hello, friends.

This site, FriendsofGeraldine.org, was attacked recently. We believe that it took place some time between the evening of March 12th and the morning of March 13th. The data for this site, including all blog posts, images, and links were deleted. This is truly devastating.

We have some backups of the design and a few of the posts. It will take a while to rebuild, and there will probably be large chunks of data that may never be recovered. As this was an ongoing journal chronicling many months of Geraldine’s story, the content isn’t easily backed up. Our first priority is to recover those blog entries, and then we will try to put it all back together. The design and content was truly a collaboration, so pieces of it are in different hands. It’s sort of like building the site all over again. Even with the blog entries, we’ve lost the dates, times, links, comments, donation tracking, and other pieces of the story that made this blog unique. There’s still hope, however, that we may get a clean backup of the entire site. Stay tuned for more info as it develops.

We’re sorry for this inconvenience. We’ll be back with some form of this site as soon as possible.


Still around…

Published March 10, 2009 Website 3 Comments
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Hi guys. I know it’s been a while since I’ve personally posted.  That’s actually good news, because it means that Geraldine is healthy enough to be able to keep the updates coming on her own!  Don’t get me wrong, she’s still weak, but she is growing stronger every day.  Thanks to all of you for your support. I’m still around, and if she’s ever unable to send updates in the future, rest assured that I’ll be keeping you posted. Let’s hope that day never comes.

On a side note, there is still much more to this story. She will have plenty of challenges to blog about in the near future. One that I know of is her desire to get back to work, and as you can imagine, this is a tough time to re-enter the job market. Best of luck with that!

Congratulations on your progress, G-bug! Keep fighting…

The Pendant

Published February 5, 2009 Website Leave a Comment
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Pendant Fundraiser Auction

Pendant Fundraiser Auction

A while back, we had an auction of a pendant that was handcrafted by Drew Weiser of Ann McKay Studio and donated to FriendsofGeraldine.org. As if the act of charity on behalf of Mr. Weiser wasn’t enough, the pendant was purchased by someone, who in turn had it shipped to Geraldine. This person is a regular visitor and support of FriendsofGeraldine.org, but wishes to remain anonymous. So not only did the proceeds to go Geraldine’s medical bills, but she also ended up owning this one of a kind piece of jewlery.

To Drew, and to our anonymous benefactor: all of us here at FoG thank you.

For our newest visitors…

Published January 22, 2009 History , Website 2 Comments
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Welcome to the site. In case you’d like to catch up, I’d start with this post. It is a letter written by Andrew, who is Geraldine’s father. It really nicely sums up the situation before we started this blog.

Other helpful historical information to have on hand is that this site was created and is maintained by Geraldine’s friends Nick, Pete, and Malcom (that’s me). Nick and Pete worked on the design, hosting, and setup of the site. They worked especially hard to get the donation utilities built. I am the main poster here, and am always sure to provide updates when Geraldine is unable. We are in this because we promised our friend that her story would be chronicled, no matter what the outcome may be, so that her daughter would have a record of everything that happened.

We work on this project, as always, in our spare time.

Currently, Geraldine is undergoing her second bone marrow transplant. The first one ended only a few weeks ago, and took about a month and a half. She has been fighting this battle for about a year and a half at this point. She hates being away from her daughter for too long, but she loves it when you leave her notes of encouragement. Please note, however, that some comments are moderated on an as-needed basis.

Thank you for your continued support.

Don’t forget to check out this post! It’s very helpful.

Status report – chemo and donations

Published September 24, 2008 Medical Bills , Treatment , Website 7 Comments
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Geraldine and Vivi

Geraldine and Vivi

Geraldine is currently undergoing her third ICE chemotherapy treatment session – which lasts three days and is administered in a hospital – and is definitely feeling run down already.  She’ll be out after Thursday, and probably out of touch for a bit after that as she recovers from it.  I’ll be posting a separate update for everyone once she gets home and begins getting her strength back.

I want to thank everyone for their comments. These all mean so much to her, they keep her going when she feels alone. Please continue to leave comments whenever you can, even if you can’t donate.

Speaking of donations – wow – you guys have really blown everyone’s expectations away. Thank you for your generous contributions. All donations, no matter how small or large, are very much appreciated. At this point, we’ve raised over $4k, and still going strong.

Someone from this site will be posting more details about how the money will be spent, but I wanted everyone to know a few things about their donations. The first is that we’re trying to hire a lawyer or CPA to help us set up a non-profit organization. At this point, none of the money donated has been used for anything, and I believe the reason for this is that Geraldine wishes to make this process completely transparent to her contributors by documenting exactly what the money will be spent on.

Secondly, I’d like for everyone to know that there may be a large cost looming on the horizon for the clinical trial she is undertaking in the near future (the double autologous transplant). Part of this transplant may not be covered by the insurance company, leaving her with an approximate $50,000.00 bill.  When I have more info on this, I will let everyone know, and we will set a clear fundraising goal for this procedure.

Lastly, we’ve all decided on what will happen after she’s free and clear of cancer.  Geraldine and her friends will attempt to form an official non-profit charity to help others in their time of need. One idea that has been tossed about has been to help others that face these types of extreme illnesses. Another idea is to release the code for the donation and tracker widgets as free, open source modules so that others can use these tools for their fundraising efforts. These are just concepts at this point but it is in our plan to do something with this site and any money left over once she has won this fight.

When Geraldine can’t update you, one of us will. Please keep checking back, please keep those encouraging comments coming, and please forward this site on to others.

Thank you

FriendsofGeraldine.org

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