Search GiveIndia's donation options on any website now!

Posted on Monday, April 27, 2009 at 3:10 PM

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Today's post is courtesy Dhaval Udani, GiveIndia's CIO and tech wizard. Dhaval has developed a cool tool which will allow you to search for GiveIndia donation options on any website. Here's what he has to say:

You read an article about a poor girl child in a village in the hinterlands of India. You felt immediately for her and at that moment decided you wanted to do your bit to help a girl child somewhere in India educate herself and earn her own livelihood but you don't know how to go about it.

Now with a browser extension called Ubiquity (definition: the state of being everywhere at once), available on the Firefox browser and a GiveIndia "command", you will soon be able to realize and act immediately without even needing to go to the GiveIndia search page.

Ubiquity is a flexible Firefox Extension that lets you do all sorts of things to give you more control of your browsing experience, including the ability to add specific Ubiquity "commands" (or tools for enhacing your Firefox browser).

Steps are (all in Firefox):
1. First, download Ubiquity to your Firefox browser. (Check out the video on the page to be fascinated by the capabilities of Ubiquity - allows you to create mashups seamlessly)
2. Restart browser
3. Again open Firefox and go to http://www.giveindia.org/ubiq_giveindia.html
4. It will ask you to subscribe with a button in the top-right corner. Click the button and you will get a scary looking screen which says "Untrusted source etc etc". Accept it (since all the "commands" written on the Ubiquity platform today are untrusted and you would have installed the GiveIndia command.

In short, if you are going through an article on timesofindia.com related to the girl child like this one and you decide you want to donate to a girl child:

1. Select the word "girl child" from the article
2. Hit the space bar and Ctrl at the same time
3. Type "giveindia" (without the quotes) and then press Enter.
4. And voila - You will be taken to all donation options of GiveIndia relating to the "girl child". :-)
You can also do this without selecting any word but just invoking Ubiquity through Ctrl+Space and then typing "giveindia girl child" (without the quotes to give you the same effect)

Ubiquity has helped us to create a tool which allows us to make a difference anywhere and everywhere very easily. It's up to us now to make that difference.

In case any of you use this tool, please do send us your feedback!