A Return to Blogging?

It's been a long time since my last update - almost a month and a half. It's hard to believe that so much time has passed, but there it is in plain sight. I've been so busy trying to get Kiva together that I really haven't had time for anything else. I've never felt so singularly dedicated to anything before. It's a great feeling, but sometimes I'm afraid I'll burn out. You can only work so many 15 hour days in a row.

The past few months have been really exciting. It's amazing for me to look at the Kiva website. So many things go through my mind - we've enabled well over $100,000 in loans to 9 different countries. That's a lot of money in America, let alone in Honduras or Cambodia or Uganda. Incredible to think about all the repercussions that money will have for years to come.

As for me, my skills have grown exponentially. I've done more in the past five months with Kiva than I did in two and a half years at a certain unnamed government organization where I used to work. My latest triumph has been the creation of a banner that people can post on their websites to promote Kiva businesses. You can see it in action over on the right.

Basically, I wrote a bunch of PHP code that generates some javascript code. Then, the javascript generates HTML that's wrapped up in CSS so that it formats correctly. All this is pretty much transparent to anyone who wants to use the banner on their site - for the end user, the banner on the right is produced by including one line of code in a web page:

<SCRIPT type='text/javascript' src='http://www.kiva.org/banners/bannerTower.php'></SCRIPT>

That's pretty damn cool, if I may say so myself. And if you had asked me to do it a year ago you would have gotten a blank stare. Not anymore though. I've rediscovered why I got into this field in the first place, and it's great to feel so inspired.

If I may be so bold as to quote one of my personal tech heroes:

"yes i love technology, but not as much as you, you see, but still i love technology, always and forever...."
- Kip Dynamite

Posted by flow Frazao on June 7, 2006 at 05:03 AM in Kiva/VEF | Permalink