Developing eWrite

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The Tuesday push is part of a coordinated effort to spread the work of the Irish tech community.

Crewger is new to me so I took a look around the site to see whats available.

Watching movies is a favorite pastime of mine, its great to have a site like this with news and updates, especially for the Irish scene, I’ve bookmarked the site alongside long time favorite imdb.com.

The site has a newsfeed which serves up all the latest news, reviews, interviews and more from the world of online film, well worth a look.

In their own words:

Crewger is an organisation dedicated to the production, promotion and exhibition of original content by film-makers of all ages and backgrounds working in Ireland today.

They have a Crewger survey on their site aimed at film makers of any level in Ireland and they’d love if you filled it out. They’re also taking registrations for their upcoming beta features.

A few friends of mine are involved in film making, they’ve often created short films of their own. I’ve passed the site link on to them. They’ll interact with this site a lot more than I will, they’ll be able to sign up and use items like the Cast & Crew finder where as I’ll just read all the news on the site and do little else.

Signed up to the beta features, looking forward to seeing whats under the hood.

Follow Crewger on Twitter.

Bummer. Received an email from Seedcamp yesterday thanking me for applying and unfortunately I didn’t make the short list this year. I was pleased enough to get the email at all, last year I applied without any preparation and received no response. You get back what you put in i suppose. This year I put some work into the application, I didn’t make it but thats OK, I have plenty to learn to help me to promote the work we do with the eWrite software.

Earlier in the month my hopes were raised when I saw that someone involved in Seedcamp signed up to try our eWrite Lite free demo. To use the demo you supply a name and website address. I checked the address and found it to be a site involved with Seedcamp. I was very happy to see they had taken a look and begun to get a little twinge of hope that we might make it through.

It would be amazing to get some feedback from the judges, I imagine this wouldn’t be very practical though, I suspect they’ve had a lot of entires to look though. 100 more entries this year than last year according to their email. Im pleased they looked at the demo at all and I’ll take it as a complimet and continue working hard.

Maybe next year

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I often have ideas that would might make useful web apps, I’m sure I’m not the only one. Rather than write them down somewhere and loose them I’m going to write them on this blog. Perhaps there would be someone else that could run with some of them.

I’ll keep this going each Friday for the next 4 weeks or so, to see if I can consistently come up with ideas. If anyone would like to take any of these ideas and run with them go ahead, a comment on the blog would be cool too though. Also, if I happen to have an idea that’s already out there, feel free to give out to me

Some loose ideas this week, mostly related to Google Reader:

• It would be handy to have the ability to post comments on a users blog while still inside Google Reader, rather than having to go to the users site to post comments.
• The ability to read blog comments within Google Reader too rather than heading to the site to read them.
• I comment on other blogs and other item such as Forums. It would be cool to have some method of storing all the messages I’ve posted in various places.
• Google Reader should be able to filter out the same story if it appears in multiple feeds, it can be annoying seeing the same iPhone story again and again.

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Yesterday I used OnlineMeetingRooms.com for the first time as part of James Corbetts Coffee Cooler. Online Meeting Rooms is run by Joe Garde and when I logged in, Joe himself was logged in so we had a quick chat.

I assumed it would be a little clunky especially considering my ongoing LAN/Broadband reliability issues but it all ran very smoothly. My 1MB connection didn’t quite meet Joe’s recommended connection speeds for using Online Meeting Rooms but there were no problems at all, the video and audio never went out of sync.

I got to see some very useful features such as being able to share a browser window where the host could append notes or drawings. The quality of the video could also be  put up or down to allow it to better suit the different connection speeds of a user. Users windows could be moved around too and resized to facilitate a main talker if there were plenty of people taking part.

I’d love to use it again with a few more people joining in to see how it holds up. I might also suggest using this to a few customers in Dublin that we visit from time to time to save on travelling up and down. It would be a handy way to show a user how to perform certain actions in the eWrite software for example without the need for them to install any new software.

A few months back I wanted to get a separate phone number for the home office so that I wouldn’t have to use the home phone for calls.

At the time I checked Skype to see if I could get a phone number for Cork. For whatever reason it wasn’t available at the time. The other day it popped back into my mind so I checked Skype, they were available again!

I’d love to be able to set up a number that would spell out ‘ewrite’ but it wasn’t meant to be. All the Cork (021) numbers available started with 2348***.

The number I ended up buying is 021 2348553. It cost €57.50 including VAT for one year. 3 months is also available for €17 or so.

To try it out I phoned the new number from the house phone, it worked just fine except for a little echo of my own voice.  Later in the day I received a couple of calls using the number and it all work flawlessly, grand sound quality.

Caller ID isn’t available for these Irish numbers from Skype however.  If I call someone now from Skype it will show my mobile number as the caller ID, which is fine with me. It takes 24 hours for this caller ID to kick in.

So now with my new number and my trusty Binatone cordless phone / internet phone (€44.99 from Argos) I can make and receive calls from Skype without clocking up the home phone bill.

A good friend and fellow developer Matt Hart has created a handy tool for helping developers find unclosed HTML tags on their sites.

HTML Tag Checker can check the HTML tags of online web pages. It will tell you how many errors there are, and highlight them within the structure of the HTML.

To date it has checked a total of 141 web pages and found 1923 errors.

Matt recently gave me a hand to get the eWrite Lite Demo online to allow users to try out the content manager using some of their own pages.

Matt is one of those frustratingly intelligent guys that if left alone for 5 minutes with a computer and an idea will create something great. Recently he has also created a couple of fun games, Battleships-Online and Boondog.

Inspired by Matts interest in Parkour (free running) Boondog has received some great attention in a short time. Written in FreeBasic, it has been downloaded nearly 700 times and was recently reviewed on bytejacker.com.

Battleships-Online is my favourite though, in between jobs I often nip off to the site and take a couple of turns when I should be working.

Looking forward the next app out of Matt..

eWrite has been around for a number of years, operating comfortably providing software and support to a number of businesses in Ireland.

Earlier this year I started something which I’ve wanted to do for some time, I begun to make smaller versions of the various tools we have created along the way focusing on content management, email marketing and protecting web forms from spam.

A new site was created at http://www.ewritecork.com to promote these new products. I want this site to accurately reflect the work and features we have put into the applications we have developed. To me, creating a bullet point list of the features and benefits for an application is a a good way to explain the useful points of a programme, though this isn’t going to impress anyone.

When explaining or ’selling’ a programme, are there recommended titles to use, such as introduction, features, testimonials, price?

Are there any sites out there that are great at explaining and promoting their software?

To help spread the word for the Moviestar.ie Irish Web Awards 2008, eWrite have put an ad on facebook to run for 14 days.

We’ve spent only a small amount on it, $73 (50 Euro). The ad will run from Tuesday August 19th to Monday September 1^st. The parameters for the Facebook ad are : $1 will be paid for every click and a maximum of $5 will be spent each day.

Hopefully this will bring some well deserved attention to the awards. Thank you to Damien Mulley for all the work he has put into this.  Check out the blog for day by day details.

Don’t forget to nominate your site, its free!

eWrite Messenger Login

Recently I have been working on ‘eWrite Messenger’. It allows a business to build up and manage an address book of email addresses and send out email newsletters to as many people as they like.

The main feature of eWrite Messenger is being able to send out these emails and record if readers are receiving the emails, if they are reading the emails and what links are they clicking.

One of the methods used to record this information is using PHP to add a unique email ID and a user ID into each email. When the email is loaded a PHP script disguised as an image is loaded and the email ID and user ID are passed to it via a querystring. The script then saves this information which allows the progamme to know which user opened which email.

eWrite Messenger - Recently sent emails

This process is well known and often blocked by many anti virus programmes either on the users email server or the server sending out the emails in the first place.

My question is WHY???

As always there is probably a way to abuse this approach to rob a persons emails or address book. Why isn’t there an accepted form of logging information from an email? We all have Google Analytics or similar on our sites and blogs which log far more information about every visitor. Why isn’t this allowed in email?

Adding this information to links in an email still works. This allows a programme to see what link was clicked by a user. It doesn’t allow a programme to log if an email was opened however and so any user who opens an email but doesn’t click on the links isn’t logged.

Another method I want to try out is using server logs. For every email newsletter created and for every user in the address book a unique image is created, probably something very small and insignificant. When a newsletter is sent out it embeds the approprate image into the email. Not a PHP script disguised as an image, just a regular image. Then using the server logs one can see what images were requested from the server.

The problem with this is that the servers don’t allow PHP code to access the logs. 2 hosting companies I use both have logs that a user can access by FTP but don’t allow PHP code to access them. Blacknight only keeps logs for 5 days!

To me, allowing PHP to access the logs to determine if specific images were loaded allows for a great way to work out what emails were loaded and by which users. No progamme or user has to worry about anti virus programmes getting in the way since they are normal everyday images being loaded.

Anyone else work in this area and have any comments or suggestions?

The Tuesday push is part of a coordinated effort to spread the work of the Irish tech community.

This week the focus is on Toddle, Beautifully Simple Email Marketing. I haven’t used Toddle before so I took this opportunity to try it out.

I added my email address and got started. The first screen presented an existing layout to customise.

Without reading any of the instructions on the screen the first thing I saw was ‘edit the header’ so I pressed it. This expanded and allowed me to remove the existing header image and upload my own. I continued to edit the rest of the articles and pasted in some Lorem ipsum to fill up some space. My main interest was in sending the newsletter.

I had assumed that Toddle would allow me to send the newsletter out to many recipients and I was curious how it managed it. A message that told me the finished newsletter would be sent to my own email address where I could forward it to anyone I want.

I pressed the ‘Send Newsletter’ button, nothing appeared to happen so I pressed it a few more times. I eventually realised it was showing an animation of ( the Twitter bird?? ) the email sending and was returning to normal very quickly.

I checked my email and received 5 copies from my multiple clicking. Luckily sending this email didn’t cost me any of the free credits.

Amused by my own impatience I returned to Toddle and began to look around in more detail. The interface is really very good and quite intuitive. I was able to edit any article in the email by clicking the tab on the left to update the heading, content or images. Adding a link to a page on my site placed a nice ‘Read More’ link to the end of the article. Adding address information to the email creates a great footer for the email which includes a vCard of your contact details, very handy.

Included in the footer of the sent newsletter are links to any previous newsletters I had created and an RSS feed of the current newsletter. I love RSS feeds so I thought this was pretty cool.

I was interested to see other layouts available. Changing the layout of the email is very easy, clicking on ‘Change Design’ provided me with 3 other layouts to choose from. I chose one of the others layouts and my email updated to the new layout keeping my xsiting text. I sent it to myself to see how it looked. I wasn’t paying attention and it cost me a credit to send out. More credits are available using Paypal and cost only €6 per credit.

I’m glad I took the time to check out Toddle. The interface is clean, clear and great to use. I know a few businesses that have asked for email templates, I’ll be recommending they sign up to Toddle now!

Some comments

When I update an article, it might be helpful to change the ‘edit article 01′ to the title that I write in myself so it becomes ‘edit article whats new…’ assuming I add a title.

The number of articles is quite rigid, it might be usful to allow more articles to be added or removed though this would be harder to implement with some of the templates.

When I sent the newsletter, the animation was very fast, I didn’t realise at first that it had sent at all.

When I was choosing a different template, it would be good to add the credit cost underneath the template or when I hover over it like the template thats free to send.

Advanced sending options wasn’t available after I used up my credits.

The Advanced sending options allowed me to see a text version of the newsletter I had created. Could there be a link to this text only version within the HTML version of the email ?