As you have probably read Brendan Cosgrove has created a team for AOC member to participate in the NOAH Thing-A-Thon.  I feel very strongly that NOAH deserves our effort to ensure their fiscal strength so that they can accomplish their lofty goals.  To that end my company, Pandora Systems, will match 10% of all funds raised by Team AOC and their members; up to $1,500!

I am sure you have a lot of questions about how you can help.  So here is my attempt to explain it all.

Q. How can AOC members participate?
A. Given the disperse geographic locations physically meeting will not be possible.  That however it doesn't mean we can't give back.  Team AOC will not have an event to per say.  But instead will make their friends and families aware that NOAH needs there help.  Now of course you can get creative.  Your child's event could be cleaning their room, and you family is sponsoring that.  You could be volunteering for a local charity, be sponsored for that.  Two birds with one stone there.  Local charity gets your time and NOAH get your financial assistance.  Of course you could sit back and do nothing.  Me, what will I be doing?  I will be volunteering my time to NOAH for one of their many Information Technology needs.  If you have other idea's please share them on the Thing-A-Thon 2008 Forum.

Don't forget, if you want to host your own event you can do that as well. 

Q. What is this Events.Org site?
A. Events.Org is the vendor who is providing the software so that NOAH can mange the A-Thons Online.  So your sponsorship page will be hosted by them.  Your friends and family will got their site to sponsor you.  Below are some direct links to key pages within their site:

NOAH A-Thon 2008 Homepage (http://www.events.org/noah08/)
Team AOC Page (http://www.events.org/sponsorshipteams.aspx?event=12334&team=37)
Join Team AOC (https://www.events.org/creg.aspx?e=12334&m=10) - Choose Team AOC from Existing Team drop down.
Sponsor Team AOC (http://www.events.org/sponsorshipteams.aspx?event=12334&team=37) - Click the red sponsor team button.

Q How do I join?
A. You go to Registration page on Events.Org and sign up; make sure you choose Team AOC from the existing team drop down.  It's free, once you have your sponsorship page start letting your friends and family know.  They can go to that page and sponsor you.

Q What is Pandora Systems offering and why?
A. Pandora Systems has been long time friend of NOAH.  They have been providing licensing and host of the AOC for many years as well as NOAH main site.  They also provide other IT services to NOAH for no cost.  What they are offering for this event is to match 10% of all funds raised by Team AOC.  So if Team AOC raises $1,000 Pandora Systems will donate $100 dollar at the end of the event.  However, if Team AOC raises their goal of $10,000 then Pandora Systems will donate an additional $1,000.  Finally, Pandora Systems feels that Team AOC can exceed their goal and they are willing to match 10% of $15,000.  They hope to be send the entire amount, but only if Team AOC does their part.  So please do your part to help NOAH!

Please remember this site and all that NOAH does cost money.  So please do what you can to help NOAH continue to provide for the Albinism Community.

Thanks
Tim

The Albinism Online Community (AOC) makes most content available to Feed Readers.  In brief a Feed Reader is an application the checks for updates to feeds you subscribe to.  For the purposes of this article I will be using Google Reader, which is Google's Feed Reader. 

Google Reader is free and runs completely inside a web browser.  So there is not applications to install and you can access it with any web browser.  To get a Google Reader account is quite easy.  Just go the Google Reader homepage and sign-up.

Today's newest browser have support built in to recognizing when feeds are available.  Feeds are often called RSS or Syndications.  The universal symbol for a RSS feed is .  On most pages on our site you will see the  in the address bar. Which would look like this:

If you click on the syndication icon then you will be redirected to a subscribe page. That looks something like this.

By clicking Subscribe now you will add that pages content to your subscriptions.  As items get added to the AOC they will appear in Google Reader.  By checking Google Reader you can keep up with all the data from our site.  You will also be able to click on the items title and be brought directly that item on the AOC.

Here are list of popular RSS feeds to which you may wish to subscribe to:

• Forums
• All new posts across all forums.
• All Unanswered posts across all forums
• General Forum
• Adult with Albinism Forum
• Teens With Albinism Forum
• Parents Forum
• Blogs
• All Blogs
• From Desk of Noah Blog
• AOC Announcements - This Blog

There are many more feeds available on the AOC.  Including one for each thread. So, if your new to feed readers, or you are addict like me.  We have feeds that will get you exactly the info your interested in.  Please take a look and will be happily surprised how efficiently you can keep up to date with the AOC.

We just completed an update to Community Server, the software the powers this site.  This was basically a service release, for us.  There are not many new features in this upgrade.  Instead it provides some performance enhancements and bug fixes. 

If you see any issues, please let us know.

About this blog

Why did we add this blog?  Basically, there are a lot of things going with the Albinism On-Line Community (AOC).  Some of these things are added content.  Some of these things are technology changes.  So in hope to address these issue we, the AOC committee, will post occasionally on the topics.

Catching up

Okay so something have changed in the AOC.  We may not have communicated them very well, or at all as the case may be.  So in a hopes of catching all our frequent users up on what has been going on here is list of changes made in the last few weeks.

• Removed AOC Announcement Forum - We have removed the AOC Announcements forum.  Since the site has added blogs, we felt that a blog was a better way to communicate announcements pertaining to the AOC.
• Added AOC Announcement Blog - That is this blog.  A blog makes more sense to use as a means to post the AOC announcements. 
• Added ability to search members - This feature allows you search the AOC members.  Not enabling this from day one was on over site. To access this feature you can find a link on the forums page. Top right hand corner under the heading of shortcuts.
• Added Blogs - We added blogs to site.
• From the Desk of NOAH - This is an official NOAH blog.  It will contain organization announcements from the NOAH Board of Directors.
• NOAH's Parents Blog - This blog is a group blog of parents of children with albinism. 
• NOAH's Adults With Albinism Blog - A group blog with all contributors being adults with Albinism.
• AOC Announcements - This blog.
• Living on the Frontlines - This blog is a mirror.  Which means the original blog exists some where else.  I this case the original is here.  The Author of this blog is Heather Kirkwood. Heather has very well established blog with a focus on HPS.  Rather than asking her to blog on our site as well, it seemed mirror her content here made more sense.  Heather has welcomed NOAH to her blog, this post provides a great introduction to Heather and her blog.
• Reduced the size of Forum Sidebar - We reduced the overall size of the right sidebar in the forum section. 
• We added a sidebar to the Forum - We added a link to the 5 most recent blog entries to the Forum sidebar.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading we hope you will continue to read our announcements.  We have great plans for this community and look forward to sharing them with.  In future post we hope to introduce you to some of the great, but not so obvious, tools of this site.  Stay tuned..