Thanks, all who attended, and as always, thanks to our sponsors PowerDNN - providing us a home at this website: ChicagoDNN.org - and J&S Tech Design who is providing the GotoMeeting room for us to meet this month. We had our introductions, did a review of the state of DNN and the User Group, and dove into our topic for the night, Good Will To Men - With DNN. Read on for the details and the video clips.

Here's the great thing about having a meeting online: attendees can be scattered everywhere! This month's meeting was certainly a good example. We had attendees from California, Arizona and Florida along with those from the Windy City area. Thanks to all the attendees - you made the meeting a joy to run. Tell your friends to join us next meeting.

Jim reported on a number of DNN-related subjects: our social media exposure (some great news in the video!), DNN Corporate blogs of note, version update news, and more. Take a look/listen:

Good Will to Men with DNN

Being in the Christmas season and thinking of helping others this time of year, I thought it would be nice to give some notice to clients and colleagues who have DNN websites that do good works, whether they promote a cause, help a group of people or run a local community. So we created a list of sites and talked about them for a few minutes. Here are each of the sites, shown in their own little video clip.

Introduction

DuPage Community Foundation

Warrenville Arts Council

Caregiver Harbor

Waterleaf Women's Center

Henry County Government

Will County Democratic Party

Will County Health Department

Contact Zonies Agility

Do you have a Do-Good DNN Site? 

We'd love to share it with the community. List it in the comments and definitely leave a link so we can visit it.

Tech Talk - Phil Wegrzyn

Carrying on the theme of doing good, Phil demonstrated a system of several components working together to provide a low-cost way to serve email newsletters to large groups of members or supporters. 

Phil combined the DNN core user system with a module called Bulk Emailer to schedule and send emails from the site, plus Ventrian's news module to format the newsletter and provide RSS to signal that it's time to send it, Then he used Amazon SES to send the newsletters so his own server didn't have to push out all that traffic, and finally Microsoft Live Writer as an easy way for non-html folks to write the news. Follow along as Phil shows how it all works: