ScoutMailer Case Study
I’m a big fan of the e-mail marketing app Campaign Monitor (CM). A couple of months back I wrote a post about how I resell CM to a niche market as ScoutMailer. Today the folks over at Campaign Monitor have posted a case study of ScoutMailer with some insights on how to resell CM to other niche markets. Check it out!
Your thoughts: why so negative?
I came across this post on TechCrunch yesterday about SitePoints new project Flippa. I’m a fan of SitePoint, have been for many years, but I have not used any of their auction or design services. The thing that struck me the most about this situation is how negative the feedback and responses have been in regards to the new change to SitePoints website marketplace. I read it a couple of times and I kept coming back to a more general question: why is it that we typically respond to things we disagree with or don’t understand in anger?
I’m just as guilty of this as the next guy… your number 23 on hold for phone support or your routine has been disrupted by product changes or something you have no control over and you fly off the handle at anyone or anything without thinking. Like SitePoint I recently made some modifications in one of my programs that users didn’t quite understand and instead of engaging me in open and civil dialog I received a number of very pissed and clearly unhappy e-mails. Why is it that when these sort of things happen we rush to anger instead of calmly and collectively reaching out to the person or companies involved to see if there is anything that can be done to correct what we see as a problem?
Your thoughts?
Simplified Compatibility Checking
Fever, a new RSS feed reading application, just launched recently. Many of you might be familiar with the developer Shaun Inman from his popular stats tracking app Mint. I haven’t personally used Mint but I’m a huge fan of RSS feeds so when I heard about Fever I had to give it a shot. I will probably talk about the application a little later after I’ve had a chance to play with it. But, in this post I wanted to talk briefly about the unique checkout process Shaun uses to help make sure his users are installing the program on a compatable system before they even enter their credit card number.
Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 2) – Account Configuration
If you’ve ever accepted payments with PayPal you’ll know all the magic is in the settings/configuration. There are tons of configuration options that you can modify to make PayPal work just the way you like. The same holds true for Spreedly. The developers have paid attention to detail and provided us with the ability to tweak how the service interacts with your chosen payment gateway so you can get just the functionality you’re looking for. In the last post I gave you a brief introduction to Spreedly and walked you through creating your own free test account. Today we’re going to jump in head first and look at the account configuration options.
Speedy Subscriptions Using Spreedly (Part 1) – Overview & Account Setup
I developed Sign-Up-Sheet.com four years ago first as a sandbox project for learning Ruby on Rails (RoR). After becoming disillusioned with RoR, I redeveloped the app in PHP using CodeIgniter (CI) and that’s where it’s been ever since. Every once and a while I try to add a new feature here or there but find it very difficult to focus any time/energy on a product that doesn’t generate any revenue. The solution to this problem, of course, is to start charging for the service. But every time I researched what was involved with accepting credit cards the complicated pricing schemes and high costs always turned me away. That was until I found Spreedly! This post kicks off a new series that will take a detailed look at Spreedly. Over the next couple of weeks, I will introduce you to the service, walk you through how their system works and give you a real world example so you can see it in action.
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Facebook Connect Library for CodeIgniter
Just a brief follow-up to the post series I did a while back on Implementing Facebook Connect with CI. Today, Elliot Haughin continued his tradition of releasing helpful CI libraries and published a new library for implementing Facebook Connect using CodeIgniter. Haven’t had a chance to review it personally yet but I would imagine it’s just the thing to make implementing Facebook Connect on your CI site easier. Check it out!
Support the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children
“The U.S. Department of Justice reports that in a one-year period of time 797,000 children were reported missing. That is an average of 2,100 children reported missing each day. 1,682,900 children ran away or were thrown away. 203,900 children were abducted by family members. 198,300 children were involuntarily missing, lost or injured. 58,200 children were abducted by nonfamily members.”
“The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has been instrumental in improving the recovery rate from 62% to 96%.” – NCMEC Timeline
The NCMEC is the nations resource for child protection and is celebrating 25 years of service in 2009. In this day in age when kids can log onto the Internet and befriend anyone with a screen name it’s more important than ever that we have organizations like the NCMEC to aid in the recovery of lost children and prevention of child exploitation. That’s why I’ve chosen the NCMEC as by cause to blog for. You can learn more about the NCMEC by viewing this promotional video available on their website.
This blog post is part of Zemanta’s “Blogging For a Cause” campaign to raise awareness and funds for worthy causes that bloggers care about.
Building Applications using CodeIgniter (Part 4) – Code Templates
Last July I wrote a post entitled “What does your code say about you?” In that post I discuss the importance of writing clean well formatted code. It’s vitally important, even if you are the only programmer working on a project, that you document and format your code because you may be the only programmer now but who knows about 6 months or a year from now. Plus, as a programmer, the code you write is a direct reflection on you as a professional.
So far in this series I’ve discussed my typical application structure, configuration and helper files when developing apps using CodeIgniter (CI). In this final post I’ll review creating code templates for quick consistent development.
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Building Applications using CodeIgniter (Part 3) – Helpers
So far in this series we’ve discussed framework/application structure and configuration information. The next thing I always add to new applications is some common helper files I’ve developed and that come in handy in most projects. CodeIgniter (CI) helpers are very flexible tools to assist with common tasks throughout the app. If it doesn’t belong in a controller and is too small for a custom library then a helper might be just what the programmer ordered.
Your thoughts: Do web apps need offline components?
I’ve seen a lot of discussion over the last couple of months about things like Google Gears and Adobe Air, technologies that make it easier to develop web applications that can be run/accessed from the desktop. The more I consider this concept the more I scratch my head in confusion. I have had a request or two from my customers to develop desktop components to my systems but have always dismissed the concept because of the complexity. That and I guess I just don’t understand the need.
I believe that the web is becoming the operating system of the future. More and more SaaS companies are popping up everyday and more apps are finding their way online until most of the software people use will be web based. When I boot up my computer the first program I open is a web browser. So that brings me to the question at hand: do web apps need offline components? I’m referring to desktop clients (like the multitude of Twitter clients I’ve seen lately) and separate versions that let you work when you don’t have Internet access (which is slowly becoming a rarity). Is it really worth all the work and complexity that goes along with it?
