In honor of NickTech.org's 20th birthday, I've been cooking up a new version of the List Students Auto-Loader plugin.
Now if only I new someone with a yacht. We could do a yacht party as well.

NEW IN VERSION 5.2 

• You can add an optional Description to your list set which will display when your list is loaded (under the report title row). 
• A Tips and Tricks link appears to the right of the report title box. Pops up a dialog with a few tidbits I've picked up over the years.
• Better UI for selecting schools when editing a list set. Now has a filter and other improvements for large districts.
• Other UI improvements: inline error and success banners, focus/tab order, corrected auto-scrolling, auto-select newly-created list.
• Security improvements.
• Now fully translatable!

That's right — this old website has been around since 2006. 
It started as a humble database of free software for my teacher friends. I use the term "database" loosely, since everything was static HTML pages.
It also served as a home for AppleScripts, the most popular of which mass-converted AppleWorks documents to Microsoft Word — the hot new thing on Mac OS X at the time.
Then the district implemented PowerSchool, which had just been acquired by Apple and would run on an Xserve. (Yes, Apple made servers at one point kids.)
So why not start giving away some of the customizations we built? Not to brag, but back then this site was the #1 result when you searched "PowerSchool customizations" — on both Google and AltaVista.
At some point my wife thought it would be cool to digitize our recipes. I was teaching myself PHP at the time and it sounded like a neat project. 
That's pretty much the history. Thanks for indulging an old ed-techie.
 

Origin Story: The Name

When I first joined a school district, I was the "everything that plugs in" guy. They set up a helpdesk email that was easy to remember: tech@thedistrict.org.
Shortly after starting, I was helping out in a classroom when the teacher looked up and said, "How ironic that your last name is Tech and you went into this line of work."
Hence Nick Tech.
The .org is just because .com and .net were both taken in 2006. Those were pretty much your choices back when the internet was fun.
 

Hey look! Pearson decided to add a column to their accommodations template. 
Why would they do that so close to testing? 
According to the new version of the field guide, they had to add the "Spanish Language - Spanish" column because it turns on Spanish in TestNav.
But there was already a "Online Spanish Form (w/ TTS)" column for this!
If you are using the IARrific or IARrific + ACCESS plugins, go ahead and update to version 4.0.5.
Thank you to Tyrone for reaching out.