Change

Okay, I’m now the administrator of a largish Facebook group and facing the problem of finding a particular member when I want to add them as an admin. The following script may be helpful to convert the list of all members to a delimited text file that can be imported to Excel, and used for that purpose or other metrics.

Notes:

• You can get the list of all members from the “edit officers” page.
• My version of Excel (2002) isn’t working too well with non ASCII characters in names. If anyone knows a UTF-8 converter that could be used here (to, say, remove diacritical marks and such — we’re not dealing with huge amounts of non-ASCII data), please let me know.
• There’s nothing but name and network here. But if you’ve got another list of stakeholders, it might be able to match your Facebook supporters with that.
• Networks don’t show for some folks. It may be a problem with people who are in more than one network — haven’t really investigated.


# convert list of members (most recent to earliest) from a facebook group
# format
# First{additional} Last {(Network)}
# to the format
# Number:First{additional}:Last{:Network}
# where number is earliest to most recent

sed 's/make officer//' | # delete cruft
sed 's/^ *\* //' | # delete more cruft
awk '{printf "%s\t%s\n", NR,$0}' | # number lines
sort -nr | sed 's/^[0-9]*.//’ | # print in order of last to first then delete numbers
awk ‘{printf “%s:%s\n”, NR, $0}’ | # renumber in the order folks joined the group, with number as first field
sed ’s/ \([A-Z][^ ]*\) (/:\1:/’ | # if a network, put separators before last name and network
sed ’s/ \([A-Z][a-z]*\)$/:\1/’ | # if no network, put separator before last name
sed ’s/)//’ # delete trailing ) for lines with a network


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These documents were publicized through standard AAUW channels about a month ago. There may be some interest from folks who aren’t in that loop.

Dear AAUW Webmanagers and AAUW Newsletter Editors:

I am pleased to announce the release of the second paper in the series “Facebook for AAUW”.

The links for these papers are:

#1: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=ddzhjjgr_41fmk9jr
#2: http://docs.google.com/View?docID=dg5fnwtg_0c7srw2wx

The first document addresses “what is Facebook” and gives brief instructions on how to get started. The second document is a more in depth discussion of why AAUW members are finding Facebook a good platform for connecting with each other and how they are using it to advance the mission.

The documents have been authored collaboratively by a completely unofficial group of members from across the country who came together in Facebook. Many of them have found Facebook a comfortable place to exchange information on a wide range of topics — personal and professional as well as AAUW. We invite you to join us to find out if Facebook would be a way to expand your network and amplify your voice.

The documents are written for the “digital immigrants” — those of us over a certain age who may want some background information before jumping into this new environment. However, if you’d rather just explore on your own, feel free to skip the papers and go straight to exploring Facebook. Once you’ve joined, please do also join the AAUW group that you’ll find at http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2419848109

At least one state convention will be using this information as part of one of their workshops. You may wish to use the link to the AAUW group or these documents on your web sites or in your newsletters to let your members know that there is an AAUW presence there.

Thanks, all.

-Nancy

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This should be easier, but …

The AAUW PSA’s are distributed as PDFs, with a fairly large block of white space, presumably for folks to put in local information. Now, not being one to do cut and paste to merge information — and wanting to be able to send the PDF to the copy shop electronically, I needed another solution.

I finally killed off my version of Acrobat 5 (purchased in 2003; it broke when I installed v8 of Reader) and have been moderately happy with CutePDF Professional as a replacement. So here are the steps I used:

1. Download the high resolution, color version of a PSA
2. Open it with CutePDF Pro
3. Click the form editing option
4. Drop a text box into the white space
   • On appearance tab: change font size to 10
   • On options tab: change alignment to center and check the multiline box
5. Go back to viewer and save the file with a new name
6. Now open the new file with CutePDF Filler
7. Enter informational text into the box (web address, phone number, etc.)
8. Save the file with *another* name.
9. Open that file (again!) with CutePDF Filler. [Maybe I wasn't patient enough, but the text that I entered seemed to disappear on the save. When I opened the file again, it was, however, still there.]
10. Finally use the “Flatten Form” menu option to save the file one more time.

As I said, this should be easier. On the other hand, when I skipped some of the steps, after I sent the PDF to the copy center, the text I entered had disappeared. [I sometimes had the same problem with Acrobat -- and the "type onto the PDF feature."] So I’m documenting it here in case anyone else wants to try this.

If you want the PDFs with the boxes (the version created in #5 above), let me know and I’ll post them somewhere. If you’ve got a better way to do this (on the cheap), please post.

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