Duff.io – the personal website of Shandor Simon

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Author: shandor

  • Using ThankView API to download videos

    At the end of last year, my school used ThankView to record surprise videos for each graduating senior. We had 2-4 teachers record a short video reflecting on their relationship with the student and wishing them well. As I prepare to leave that job, I wanted to make sure the school had an archive of…

  • Using the Zoom API to deal with webinar panelists

    In response to the pandemic my school is using Zoom Webinars for various performances. Our student Improv group has done a number of performances. The cast all need to be “panelists” in Zoom parlance, and when you duplicate a Webinar it does not duplicate the panelists. That’s a pain since there are a lot of…

  • Cropping PDFs with AppleScript

    Due to Coronavirus the printing of our yearbooks was delayed, so we decided to distribute it digitally until the print version was available. There are lots of tools, like ISSUU, Uberflip, or even Google Drive that can do a decent job of displaying a PDF, password protecting it, and preventing it from being downloaded. The…

  • Virtual Graduations & End of Year Events in the time or Coronavirus: Stream Deck

    In a previous post, I mentioned that I used Wirecast to do live video production of events I broadcast using Zoom. Normally, I’d like to have someone helping me, but that’s much harder when everyone is remote. Fortunately, I found the Elgato StreamDeck to help. It’s a USB hardware device with a bunch of buttons.…

  • Virtual Graduations & End of Year Events in the time or Coronavirus: Zoom

    I’m the tech guy for a private K-12 school and have had to do a lot of work to pull off the various end of year events. Many other people have shared content that I’ve found helpful, and I hope in posting this someone else might find it useful. Mostly, I write these blogs for…

  • Using Microsoft PowerBI with the Blackbaud API

    At the recent Blackbaud K-12 Conference, I spent some time with Grahm Getty who did a presentation on using PowerBI with the Blackbaud ON products.  The ability to visualize your data is really powerful and can be used to find insights and problems in your data.  Grahm and I spent some time figuring out how…

  • Photo Directory Example

    Let’s look at a more complicated example of using the Blackbaud K12 API with the “ON” products. Recently, I had to develop a photo directory, with pictures of faculty/staff and some information (job title, room number, phone number, e-mail, etc.) about them.  There isn’t a built-in report in the Blackbaud products for this, nor is…

  • Using PHP with the Blackbaud K12 API

    In an earlier post, I showed how to use the Blackbaud K12 API interface for their “ON” products using PowerShell. Now, I’ll show you how to use PHP to do the same thing. I use PHP for all of my web applications. There are a lot of ways to access a REST based API using…

  • Leveraging Open Application Programming Interface (API) in the “ON” Products #BBK12UC Presentation

    Thanks to everyone who attended Julian’s and my presentation on that API at the Blackbaud K12 User Conference. As I mentioned at the end of the session, I think we will be “Better Together” if as users of the API we work together, collaborate and share how we are using the API. Several people have…

  • PowerShell and REST APIs

    I really like being able to use the PowerShell ISE to debug my PowerShell scripts.  By default, it splits the screen showing my script and an interactive shell that I can directly type commands into.  In my previous post, I had a simple script that used the Blackbaud API to retrieve a large list of…