Developing eWrite

My radio controlled Ford F350 car that is, not my real one.

Recently the new AIB in Blackpool in Cork have been promoting a car finance package. A friend working there borrowed the Ford and the cardboard Porche from the animated move Cars which is actually my sisters, she got it from my brother who used to work in the Cinema.

They used the cars to make a nice little promotional table in the picture below. The Ford is acutally a pretty huge car as far as radio controlled cars go, its about the size of a normal car tyre. Great fun for chasing the dog around the place.  It has a horn, flashing lights and indicators.

Short.ie is a free URL shortening service allowing you to truncate long unfriendly web addresses into short and easy to use URLs. Ideal for emailing, instant messaging and text messages.

This isn’t the first URL shortening service but it’s definitely my favorite for one main reason, the data it provides about the URLs I have shortened. When I shorten a URL, I can see how many people have clicked on the links.

Iarfhlaith Kelly kicked off the development of Short.ie. Its now an open collaboration between Iarfhlaith, David Collier and myself. Its an ongoing development and so far there are some nifty features:

• Regular URL Shortening
• Custom URL Shortening
• Click Tracking
• View All Shortened Links (per user)
• Content Recommendations
• An API
• A Firefox Plugin

This is a project we’re working on in our spare time and to be honest we’ve got absolutely no business model for it. The truth is, it’s fun to work on and it’s something we believe in. There’s no advertising on the site and we cover the costs to host it ourselves. If you feel like helping out, we’d love it if you could help spread the word. We’ve got a lot of plans for Short.ie in the future, so if you haven’t already seen it, start shortening some URLs..

Related posts:

New ideas to improve URL shortening

URL shortening service Short.ie

In July I wrote about moving the ewrite applications away from software as a service and back to software as a product and the reasons for doing so.

Springloops has played a huge part in facilitating this change. Our applications eWrite Lite, eWrite Messenger and eWrite Essentials (eWrite Lite and eWrite Messenger combined) are now all managed and deployed from SpringLoops. Our applications, updates or bug fixes can be sent to a customers site in seconds from any location.

Up until now users of eWrite Lite needed to go to www.ewritecork.com to log into their account. This is no longer the case and this login form has been removed. Ewrite users were sent an email about this change last week. Users can now log in to their applications by going to www.yourdomain.com/ewrite/

In the near future this login form on www.ewritecork.com will be back. It will be a new section allowing eWrite customers to manage their accounts, to review customer data and renew subscriptions.

A few of our customers websites have Guestbooks. More so in the past but a few still have them now. Im quite fond of them but not for the usual reasons, I enjoy combating the spam that they attract.

Preventing web forms from displaying spam is a challenge I enjoy. I dislike CAPTCHAs, I believe that any legitimate person filling out a form of any kind on a website shouldn’t have to jump through loops of any kind. That is what a computer is for, to jump through those loops for us. I don’t think owners should have to moderate the messages either.

Guestbooks are interesting because their contents could be immediately displayed on a users site. Garbled or embarrassing messages could end up on your site and a potential customer may see it before you do.

I can’t imagine it does your site any favors either if Google or some other search engine spiders see it. For these reasons some customers removed their guestbooks, only a few still use them.

I know Guestbooks can seem a little cheesy, like something from 1980’s. Some of our sites still find value in them. It can allow users to leave comments about your site, product or services. It can often be useful feedback or a nudge if you are doing something badly. They give new and original content to your site too, Google loves that.

Comments on blogs and user reviews on sites like Loudervoice are very important, they give informed and real feedback. I’d like web sites to bring back the guestbook.

To do this though, they’d need to be sure that a guestbook won’t add to their emails, they won’t want to be moderating guestbook entries every morning. I continue to learn but I’ve had great success in looking after these kinds of forms using a range of techniques. Any sites out there having this kind of trouble, I’d like to help.

Waaaay back in February, Niall Larkin was good enough to post a book to me, “The 4 hour work week” by Timothy Ferriss. In return I set him a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen. Im still working more than 4 hours a week, I wonder is Niall getting things done?

I read 4HWW and loved it. As a result I am going through a phase of reading similar books such as “Screw it, lets do it!” by Richard Branson.

The 4HWW struck a cord. There are plenty of lessons to take from it. Among them is outsourcing. It encouraged me to look around for alternatives in my various work activities. If some software was needed I would begin writing it myself. I was reinventing the wheel a lot.

Ever since, I’ve been trying to get myself out of this habit, if theres a piece of software out there that does a job well, I’ll see if I can use it, for our own work and for our customers.

Back to the book itself, the past few months it has passed through the following people that I know of..

Update : Pat Phelan

Niall Larkin

Gordon Murray (me!)

John Peavoy

Ant Galvin

Who wants it next? If you want it, you’ll have to pass it on to someone after you read it.

I lost my Jawbone bluetooth earpiece the other day, it keeps falling out of my pocket. I didn’t know I had lost it, my phone just kept disconnecting and connecting again as I moved around the place.  With the help of the bluetooth connection connecting and disconnecting I was able to find the rough direction, found it by the front door. I think the dog was running around with it for a while.

• As a result, I was thinking a cool little invention would be to idependently power one of those tiny bluetooth usb dongles and attach it to a set of keys so a person could use their phone to find their keys, or the remote control or their dog. It only takes 5v to power a USB dongle.
• It would also be cool to be able to power down a blue tooth earpiece using the phone.

I get such great use from my bluetooth earpiece. I highly recommend the new Jawbone II. My mobile only gets reception in certain places here so I leave the phone on the windowsill and use the earpiece for the calls.

All I have to do now is find a land line desk phone that can connect to the earpiece and I’ll never have to touch a phone again.

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If anyone wants to now how Not to send bulk emails, come talk to me. I recently had difficulty getting a particular clients email newsletter into their subscribers email inboxes, this costed our business a customer.

While working on the clients newsletter I decided to start from scratch to do everything I could to ensure the software and server were as valid and as transparent as possible to ensure no emails were being labelled as spam. This kicked my ass for a few days and I had some frustrations along the way. Bizarre bugs cropped up with every single test email sent. Sometimes the content displayed the HTML rather than rendering it, other times the ‘to’ name and ‘from’ name didn’t bother displaying.

Rather than more ranting about the problems, Here is a list in no particular order of the actions I took in the hopes that they will help some other company get their emails into inboxes or improve their own software.

Hosting

I Set up a new Virtual Private Server (VPS) with Blacknight - http://www.blacknightvps.com/. This provided me with a static IP address and allowed me to set up reverse DNS.

SPF Record

I Set up an SPF record for our domain name using http://www.openspf.org/.

White Lists

Requested to get our domain name listed on abuse.net

Reporting Tools

Signed up to and paid dnsstuff.com to access to their DNS testing tools. I was able to solve all problems that the reports pointed out.

Signed up to Microsoft’s Smart Network Data Services to receive data about the traffic seen originating from my IP address, such as mail volume and complaint rates.

Email headers

Added new (to me) headers to the out going emails.

Precedence: bulk
List-Id: xxxxx <yyyyy>
List-Owner: <mailto:owner@example.com>
List-Subscribe: <http://www.example.com/path/to/subscribe.php>
List-Unsubscribe: <http://www.example.com/path/to/unsubscribe.php>
List-Help: <http://www.example.com/path/to/help>

Thank you to the staff of blacknight for recommending these headers.

Existing Headers

Date: $date
To: Recipient-Name <Recipient-Email-Address>
From: Recipient-Name <Recipient-Email-Address>
Reply-To: Recipient-Name <Recipient-Email-Address>
Return-Path: Recipient-Name <Recipient-Email-Address>
Message-ID: <".time()."-Recipient-Email-Address>
X-Mailer: PHP v".phpversion()."
MIME-Version: 1.0

The position of ‘MIME-Version: 1.0′ is important. There was an excellent page about this on a site but I can’t find it now unfortunately. Some emails may not display correctly in Microsoft products such as Outlook if this header is the first header.

Reading

I read many forum posts with others also experiencing similar email marketing problems.

Referred to the SpamAssassin tests when encountering any failed tests http://spamassassin.apache.org/tests_3_2_x.html

A older blog post from Michele Neylon regarding the Do’s and Don’ts of mass emailing.

Spam assassin - tips for legitimate senders.

Spamhaus Frequently Asked Questions.

Testing

Sent test after test after test after test to myself and several other email addresses on various domains to test being labelled as false positives and layout issues.

When sending a HTML email, I was getting the PHP code to create a nice and neat text-only version. This would strip the HTML tags and then strip out all the spaces left behind. In my mind I was creating a nice and neat text version. I learned however that leaving the spaces there after trimming the HTML is best, SpamAssassin thinks the content is too different to the HTML if its trimmed back.

Sent test emails to auth-results@verifier.port25.com which provide a free automatic response. In their own words : “The service allows email senders to perform a simple check of various sender authentication mechanisms. It is provided free of charge, in the hope that it is useful to the email community.”

Wrote several custom functions to alter the layout of the emails slightly to allow the email to be displayed properly in some email domains’ web based email interfaces such as the eircom webmail interface.

When defining email headers, use ‘\n’ for line breaks on *nix servers and use ‘\r\n’ on Microsoft servers. When using the incorrect type the email headers may not display at all for some recipients.

Updated our software to send large numbers of emails in smaller chucks so as not to overwhelm anything.

Also added some helpful alerts to let a user know if they are using words or phrases that SpamAssassin doesn’t like and may lead to their email being labelled as spam.

I had problems with my ISP too, the DNS wasn’t refreshing after several days to I began using OpenDNS.org DNS details. Sadly I only found out about this close to the end of my problems but they certainly helped. At one point I couldn’t FTP into the site to make any changes at all.

Result

Our software now sends out a mean email. Unfortunately too late to convince a lost customer. Confidence is low at the moment but I will be working to continue improving the software in any way I can. I will be stricter in what the software allows a user to send out. If anyone has anything else that would help in sending emails or reporting errors, please let me know.

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In the last couple of weeks I have been working with a new customer to come on board with eWrite using our email marketing software called eWrite Messenger. Today I received an email letting me know that they would like to stop using our software to return to a previous method of emailing their customers each month.

Despite a great track record with our existing customers and a lot of work on my part to resolve the situation our software failed this company. They had ended a contract with a leading email marketing company and began to use eWrite Messenger.

From the outset there were problems across the board. Layout of the email was the first problem. I recreated the email ensuring it looked identical but with far less HTML. The next problem was that many people didn’t seem to be getting the emails despite being received in all the tests. I started from scratch with the programming and procedures to send emails too, relearning all what I thought I already knew about sending emails the proper way and not being labelled as spam. I took many steps to make sure the email got into the recipients inboxes and when I did the formatting of the email was fecked once again. This formatting problem was caused by something very very small, line breaks in the email headers.  This was very frustrating considering all the tests to my toolbox of hotmail, gmail, eircom, yahoo and more email addresses all landed and displayed fine.

I recorded the measures I took to ensure the emails were received and I will post them up in my next post, hopefully they may be of use to others in a similar situation. I received plenty of great help and tips from a few people, especially some of the Blacknight staff.

I learned many things from this experience. Im writing about it here because I set up this blog with the intention of writing about the good stuff and the bad stuff as I develop eWrite. Losing a customer like this is not a good feeling and all the worse because not only are they a great business, the kind of customers everyone wants to have, but they are also a family led business which were neighbours growing up.

I’ve gone through embarrassment and plenty of anger with myself over this.  Much of the anger was directed at the customers hosting company who were nowhere to be found when I needed answers and assistance, their online support was fecked too.

The email from the company today to end our service wasn’t out of the blue, I could see it coming.  I know one thing for sure after this, when all tests are done and work, test some more, it could save you losing a valued customer. I won’t be losing any customers again.

I’ve never been so acutely aware of the value of great customer service. When I needed answers or expertise the expected avenues weren’t available. I’ve decided that with our own software the work is not only in creating great software that fulfils a need or solves a problem for the user but also to be there in spades any time they need support.

Yesterday in the Celtic Ross hotel in Rosscarberry I given the opportunity to talk to Soho Solo West Cork. Thank you to Calvin Jones for inviting me to talk to the members of Soho Solo.

The title of the talk was ‘Take Control of your website’. Originally I intended talking about Content Management Systems (CMS), to describe what a CMS is, why a business should consider using a CMS for their own website and to show popular CMS’s available on the web including our own CMS called ‘eWrite Lite‘.

A colleague, Pat Hough from World Class Solutions gave me plenty of great advise on the structure and the focus for giving a presentation. Without this advise I would most likely have jumped right in to the technical aspects of CMSs, talking about programming and databases and I would have lost the interest of the audience and provided no real value for their time.

Giving a broader overview of how useful a website can be to a business, I focused on my experiences with many businesses this year. Below are the notes I used to guide myself through out the presentation. They are brief bullet points to myself to ensure I stayed on the right track.

I am posting the notes here so that they might be of further use to the members of Soho Solo. I hope the notes can be used as a reminder of the talk, the questions and the discussions that followed regarding the benefits and opportunities of a website powered by a content management system.

As always, feedback is definitely welcome!

- - - - -

Take Control of your Website.
Soho Solo, Celtic Ross hotel, November 12th 2008.

Section 1 : Introduction (1 Minute)

• Hello. My name is Gordon Murray, I am the software developer for eWrite. We are a web development company based in Cork.
• I am responsible for developing our software, support and promoting our eWrite products wherever I can.
• I will be talking today about how a business can get value from its website.

Section 2 : Typical scenario I encounter (2 – 3 minutes)

• The usual scenario I come across when meeting with businesses is a business with an old website, designed by a friend, a friend of a friend or a relative
• Their website is online though performing no useful function for their business
• More than likely they have little or no control over their website to make any kind of changes at any time
• To make any changes they will need to contact the original developer who may have moved on to something else
• This developer is either unavailable or costly to make even the most basic change
• The website is either invisible to Google and other search engines, or is not displaying well on Google, MSN, Yahoo or other search engines
• The site may look old, unprofessional and may not display well in modern web browsers
• The owner is unaware of the traffic visiting the website, if any
• This website isn’t making money or performing any useful function for the business
• More than likely is it costing the business money to maintain even though its not doing anything for them

Section 3 : Things a website could do (3 minutes)

• A website can be a very valuable recourse to a business
• A website can present the details of your service or product
• A website can be a brochure to provide information to a person searching for your details such as contact information or pricing
• Provide ongoing information in the form of news or a blog
• Develop a community which provides your business with an avenue for feedback or customer support
• Become a resource to collect visitors contact details such as email addresses for email marketing
• And of course, Sell a product or service directly for money

Section 4 : Real world examples of Sections 2 & 3 (5 minutes)

In relation to functions a website can perform, some of our own clients are practical examples of these, for example:

• One of our clients is a Cork based company, a sole trader selling ornaments made from bog oak
  • They have an online catalogue of products to sell, mainly targeting the American market
  • They receives orders online several times a week
  • The process is almost fully automated, it makes money while the owner is asleep
  • The owner receives the order details by email and ships the product
• Another client of ours based in Dublin
  • It is a website for an official organisation magazine
  • They provide a public section of the site which is mainly contact information
  • The real function of the site is for its members
  • A private blog for announcements
  • A private forum for their members to discuss topics
  • Regular Polls and Surveys getting feedback from their members
• Another client based in Dublin is an charitable organisation spanning 11 countries
  • Their website contains reports and stories from these countries
  • They send a monthly newsletter to thousands or recipients all over the world
  • They have Public and private forums for active discussions both private and public
  • They have an online donations facility receiving several Euro, Sterling and US dollar donations each month

Section 5 : What eWrite does in relation to sections 2,3 & 4 (5 minutes)

• eWrite has provided the software and support for these businesses to perform these functions with their websites
• We keep the running costs down for essential purchases such as a domain name and web space for hosting
• We provide our Content Management System called eWrite Lite which allows you to update the content of your own site in your own time
• We provide Email Marketing Software called eWrite Messenger to allow you to email hundreds of users and record feedback
• We link your site with several useful free tools such as Google Analytics so you can clearly see the visitors to your site, where they are coming from, what pages they visit most and for how long
• Access to our graphic developers network to create a new website to fit YOUR budget
• We can provide customised development of a product or service
• Our software is designed to give you an easy to use interface to manage your site and services.

Section 6 : Conclusions (1 Minute)

• I hope that some of the points here are useful to your business and gives you an idea of what is possible
• I hope that I have given you some ideas as to how your website can be a useful resource for your business
• Thank you to Calvin for inviting me along to Soho Solo to talk
• Thank you all for listening to me.

Not my usual topic to write about but I think its so damn cool. Its an Apple Slicer we got in Boston recently. Just press it onto an apple and slice it in to 8 or 16 slices, removing the core. I’m eating far more apples now.

Update: It’s damn good at slicing tomatoes too for sandwiches!

Whats your favourite non techie product of the month?