Just one more round of Call of Duty and then I’ll start coding…
Anyone who is working on a project outside of work hours knows how tough it can be to actually get work done. There are a lot of distractions when you’re at home, lots of things you’d like to do, and it may actually be nice to take part in some relaxing activities to kind of wind down (for me, that’s video games). This is doubly true for coders with families: the kids are finally asleep, you spend a little time with the spouse, and before you know it, it’s 10pm.
Finally, you trudge into your office, sit down in front of your monitor, and open up your favorite IDE. Except, you don’t really want to. If you’re like me, you still want to kind of unwind, watch some TV or play some Xbox 360. So you throw on the TV, and before you know it, it’s 12:30am. Your night is now shot and no quality code is going to get written. Continue reading →
One thing that is frequently a pain is setting up dev servers to work on. This is especially true if you are working at home. Running a bunch of different services on your main system isn’t great as they are frequently performance hogs. Another option is to have a second piece of hardware running everything for you, but I’ve always had two issues with that:
It’s yet another piece of hardware driving my energy bills sky high.
It’s only a clean install once. Wiping the MySQL, Apache, Cassandra, <insert hot tech of the week>, install on a regular basis just isn’t something that happens.
One option I’ve utilized to avoid these issues are cloud services like Amazon’s EC2. They’re relatively easy to configure (once you get the hang of it) and depending on your usage, they may cost little more than the cost of the electricity for that second system you’re currently using. This is especially true if you’re a new AWS customer and you qualify for their Free Usage Tier. And best of all, a fresh system can be spun up rather quickly. Continue reading →
AWeber is a popular choice amongst internet marketers. They’ve always had good support for things like autoresponders and easy to use signup forms that can be easily dropped into any page. A quick overview of their pricing and features:
Free/Trial Plan: $1 / 30 Day Trial
Basic Plan: 500 subscribers for $19 a month
25k Subscribers: $130 a month
Pay as you go?: Not Available
Analytics: Yes
API: Yes
A/B Testing: Yes
Multivariate Testing: No
SPF/DKIM support: Yes
Signing up for AWeber is straightforward enough. The trial plan gives you full access to all the functionality available with no limit on the numbers of mailings you send. Once everything is setup, AWeber greats you with a really nice Setup Wizard which walks you through setting up your first email list:
In the previous post on Paid Services, I listed off some of the Email Service Providers (ESPs) that focus on mailing lists and email marketing. There are lots of them out there, but these are five of the leading players:
Most of these firms do fairly similar things. They have tools for gathering new subscribers, various email templates that you can modify to suit your needs, list management tools, and other marketing tools. It’s hard to say which company is the best in regards to these type of tools, as it can be fairly subjective, and the effectiveness of their offerings will vary by user. I’ll touch on a couple of the highlights for each of them, but what I’m really interested in are things that are a little more technical and more objective. The main areas of focus will be:
Analytics – Do they offer analytics, is it easy to use, and does it provide worthwhile data?
API functionality – Do they offer an API, is it easy to use, and does it offer good functionality?
A/B or Multivariate Testing – Do they support A/B or multivariate testing and how simple is it to implement?
SPF/SenderID/DKIM Support – How simple is it to setup and how helpful are they in the process?
Mailing List Import/Export – Are you able to import and/or export your mailing list? What are the requirements when you do so?
A couple of months ago I bought a website on Flippa. I’ve been happy with the purchase, but one thing I haven’t been a fan of is that the site is running an old version of Joomla, and upgrading to a more recent version isn’t a simple process. I’ve been looking at moving the site over to WordPress, but one issue I’ve been coming up against is the URL structure of the site.
One of the things that a lot of companies overlook is outsourcing their mailing lists and transactional emails. Trying to host your own lists and send your own emails can be a very costly endeavor, especially in terms of deliverability. Most online email services are actually very affordable, and you actually get something very valuable: expertise. The companies in this sector have employees working full time to make sure they are following industry best practices, as well as helping you make sure you’re doing everything you need to be doing, including following all applicable federal laws. For a small monthly fee, you’re tapping into knowledge that is worth thousands.
This post isn’t going to be breaking any new ground. I’ve been working on a project on and off for about a year now. It’s using the CodeIgniter 1.7 framework and Doctrine 1.2 for its ORM. With Doctrine, there are kind of two ways to define Models. You can create them in PHP or you can create them in YAML. I was doing the former for the longest time, but recently switched over to YAML and have been just kicking myself for not doing so sooner. Here’s an example of a model in PHP: Continue reading →
So you’ve got your SPF records setup nicely, you’ve used the tools available at the Postmaster sites, and your emails are being delivered, but now what? There are two things you’re concerned with now: are your emails being read and are they being reported as spam? Feedback Loops (FBLs) can’t help you with the former, but they can help you with the latter.
A Feedback Loop is pretty simple idea: when a user signifies that they believe your message to be spam, the email provider notifies you of this and sends you the message that was flagged. The only difficulty involved is that an FBL must be setup with each email providers and ISP individually, and that each FBL you setup has a different set of requirements. Typically, FBL information is listed on the Postmaster sites, so a good place to start is the list of sites that I have here. Continue reading →
Some of the Postmaster sites highlighted in Part 1 contain useful troubleshooting tools. There’s too many to go through all of them, so I’ve highlighted some of the most useful ones.
AOL
AOL probably has the most extensive number of Postmaster tools of any major email provider. Among them:
Reverse DNS Check
Quickly verify your reverse DNS capability. You want the IP you are sending mail from to resolve to something logical. AOL has the following guidelines and recommendations for your reverse DNS entry:
All connecting Mail Transfer Agents must have established reverse DNS
The reverse DNS entry (PTR Record) should match the domain name (A Record)
Reverse DNS must be in the form of a fully-qualified domain name
Verify Connecting IP
AOL has setup a special email address that will automatically report back to you the IP address that your email was actually sent from. This can be very helpful, especially when configuring your SPF records.
IP Reputation Check Tool
This tool allows you to check on the reputation your IP address (that you found using the above method). Generally, your reputation will simply be “Undisclosed”, which is fine. AOL just hasn’t received enough emails from you to form an opinion.
Time Warner Road Runner
The Road Runner Postmaster Site has a very nice IP status tool. It actually provides the results of a number of different spam block lists all in one place. With one query, you can check the status of your sending IP address from Return Path, Spamhuas, Cloudmark, and, of course, Road Runner. Here’s an example of the results for ericbrandel.com:
Road Runner IP Check Query Results
Comcast
Comcast has a unique tool that helps you with getting your IP address unblocked. It’s unique in that it is automated. If Comcast is the one blocking you (your block is not based on being listed as a spammer by another group) you can use their RBL Removal Form. More information is available here.
Other than the tools highlighted above, most of the providers also have a system for setting up a Feedback Loop (FBL). This is a system that alerts you when your messages are marked as spam. A post covering FBLs in a little more depth is still in the works, and will hopefully be completed in the next couple of days.
Based on a comment on my previous post, I decided to take a look at RedBeanPHP in conjunction with CodeIgniter. In about ten minutes, I had grabbed the latest releases of both (CI 2.1.0 and RedBeans 3.0.2), set them both up and had them playing nice with each other thanks to this great tutorial, and was inserting data into an empty and tableless database.
After following that tutorial, it was really this simple:
