Pledgie campaigns can now accept donations in Swedish Kronor (kr).

Pledgie campaigns can now accept donations in Singapore Dollars (S$).

Pledgie campaigns can now accept donations in Hong Kong Dollars (HK$).

By popular demand, Pledgie now supports the Australian Dollar (AUD) and New Zealand Dollar (NZD).

If you would like us to support the currency of your country, please contact us at our support site: help.pledgie.com

Fizz (Relsqui) on Pledgie was running a campaign to raise money for a button maker.

pledgie.com/campaigns/2351

Pledgie gave some money and we got buttons in return!

Thanks Fizz!

Pledgie now has a Twitter account:

http://twitter.com/pledgie

We’ll be posting when new features are added, deploys happening, planned maintenance windows, etc…

We’ve also thought maybe we’d tweet when new campaigns start, but it might get noisy (there are about 10 new a day).

What do you think?

Some of you know that I was planning on participating in the 2008 Philanthropy Midwest Conference as a attendee. However, I learned on Friday that there is one last exhibitor’s booth available. Now the co-creators of Pledgie Garry Dolley and myself have decided to try and take Pledgie as an exhibitor. To do this we need to raise $500.00 by Monday (which is the last day to sign up to be an exhibitor). We have set a goal to raise this money entirely through the Pledgie community.

Please tell your friends though blog posts, tweets, phone-calls, smoke signals you name it.

Additionally, if you’ve used Pledgie in the past and have made money through it, then please consider a small donation to this campaign to help send us on our way.

You can find out more about this campaign and the conference here:

http://pledgie.com/campaigns/2005

For those with blogs, Facebook accounts, or websites consider embedding a badge that links to our campaign by pasting this code into your page:

<a href='http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/2005'><img alt='Click here to lend your support to: Send Pledgie to the 2008 Philanthropy Midwest Conference! and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !' src='http://www.pledgie.com/campaigns/2005.png?skin_name=chrome' border='0' /></a>

We’ve supported XML for campaigns for a while now. To access it, just use the RESTful URL of:

http://pledgie.com/campaigns/<id>.xml

That is, you just tack on “.xml” to the end of the URL of your campaign page.

But now, we have added the JSON format. As you probably guessed, you access it with:

http://pledgie.com/campaigns/<id>.json

In addition, we have added a few additional fields to the result set to help developers build their own badges and stats. The new fields are:

• amount_raised (float) – Total amount donated to the campaign for all time
• views (integer) – Total views of the campaign page for all time
• percent_towards_goal (float) – The ratio of amount donated to the campaign goal amount, if a goal is specified. 0.0, otherwise.

We are currently working on a full fledged API and putting docs together to describe our existing methods. Stay tuned!

The guys over at GitHub have integrated Pledgie badges into their site as a “[way] for every public project on GitHub to, dare I say, make money.” Mark and I are super excited to support GitHub in this effort and hope to see more Pledgie badges for OSS projects around the ‘net!

More information can be found here: http://github.com/blog/57-getting-paid-the-open-source-way

One year ago today Garry and I launched Pledgie as my friend Justin Halls says "as a valentine for the internets". One year later we have become the most popular site on the entire internet receiving more traffic on a daily basis than Google + Microsoft + Yahoo combined. Ok, well so that last part is not true, but what Pledgie does have is a vibrant growing community of advocates and donors and hundreds of active and vital causes.

I know I speak for Garry when I say we are damn proud to be a part of it!

We are looking forward to this next year and as time allows we'll continue to add features to Pledgie to help ensure that it remains an important tool for raising money and awareness for causes you care about.

Garry added support for international currencies with a little free-time he had over the Thanksgiving holiday.

With international currency support campaign creators can now:

• Accept donations directly in your selected currency.
• Payment is automatically converted to your desired currency (via Paypal).
• No currency exchange costs when you withdraw funds to your local bank account.
• Campaign badges display using the correct currency symbol.

Presently, Pledgie supports these currencies:

• Canadian Dollars
• Euros
• Pounds Sterling
• U.S. Dollars
• Yen

We have plans to add support for these currencies soon:

• Australian Dollars
• New Zealand Dollars
• Swiss Francs
• Hong Kong Dollars
• Singapore Dollars
• Swedish Kronor
• Danish Kroner
• Polish Zloty
• Norwegian Kroner
• Hungarian Forint
• Czech Koruna

Here are some examples of how the new badges look:

Please let us know how we can improve our support for international currencies.

We just set up a new google group to aid the various discussions we’ve been having over email with various Pledgie members. We’d love to hear form you if you have ideas for Pledgie.

http://groups.google.com/group/pledgie/

Garry and I are at RubyConf 2007 right now and we were excited about all upcoming and just-released projects people have shown off here and so we decided to have a mini-rockdown on Pledgie while we were here face-to-face.

So without further preambling, I am announcing that we've added non-reciprocal and reciprocal relationships between users of Pledgie. In plain English this means you can now have a variety of friendships, which do or do not requires other users to know and or approve those relationships. Here is how it breaks down:

Contacts & Supporters are one way relationships, anyone can add any other user as a contact without needing approval from the added user.

Friendships are two way relationships which, require both parties to agree to be friends. If you request someone's friendship they will show up as a contact until they accept your request.

We'll be fleshing out this functionality in the coming months and make it more useful than yet another site to collect friends on!

Thanks to everyone at RubyConf 2007 who gave us positive feedback on Pledgie and who are using it for their own projects.

We've had a couple of requests for a flash-based badge or a badge, which aggregates all the campaigns of a member into one super badge. To help this effort we've rewritten the campaign pages to display a variety of different file formats. For example take the campaign for RAM as an example:

http://pledgie.com/campaigns/3

Using our new friendly formats you can now covert the campaign easily into a variety of formats.

  http://pledgie.com/campaigns/3      // Produces HTML
  http://pledgie.com/campaigns/3.xml  // Produces XML
  http://pledgie.com/campaigns/3.rss  // Produces RSS Feed
  http://pledgie.com/campaigns/3.png  // Produces PNG Badge

For people wanting to roll their own badge the XML version of the campaign would be a great place to start. Flash digests XML in a fairly straight-forward way and I don't think it would take much to produce a flash badge, which would use the XML rendering of the campaign to create a truly interactive badge for the campaign.

We will be playing with our one widget tool-kit, which we'll pass along as soon as its ready to anyone who is interested, in the meantime if any of you flash gurus want to take a crack and a Pledgie flash badge be my guest :-)

Team Pledgie received a really thoughtful letter + book + uranium enriched glass shards from Mark Allen who runs the Machine Gallery.

I have to say I did get a real warm and fuzzy feeling reading this letter and I am pretty sure it was not due to the uranium glass. Mark says that the gallery remodeling is nearly complete and that all of the people who contributed get free hugs when if they come see the new space. If you want your free hug there is still a couple of days left for contributing to the Machine Project’s campaign!

Thanks again Mark for all the cool stuff!