Developing eWrite

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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 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?

Interested it seeing eWrite Lite up and running with page of your website? We’ve created a demo of eWrite Lite allowing users to enter their existing website address and log in.

eWrite Lite will grab a few pages and images from your site so you can experience editing your own work in eWrite Lite.

Thanks to Matt Hart for helping me greatly improve an existing eWrite Lite demo.

For some time now I’ve had the luxury of having many of the websites using eWrite CMS on the same servers. This has allowed me to develop the eWrite CMS in the model of software as a service (SAAS).

The eWrite content manager was located on our own website. Clients could visit our site, log in and view their own pages for editing. In the background eWrite would update the ‘remote’ database with the updated content.

With the newer eWrite Lite, I continued this approach as long as possible to allow for easier development and maintenance on my part.

For various security and connectivity issues I will be moving eWrite Lite away from this approach and following the approach used by Wordpress. eWrite Lite will be a set of files a user can upload to their site, run a setup wizard which will create a basic website and log the user into eWrite Lite to begin creating their first pages and managing their files.

It will mean a little more work for me deploying new files or updates for eWrite Lite to users websites, but Im looking forward to to the change in approach.

Until now, eWrite was quite limited in getting users to be on servers we could control. With this new approach I will be making it as easy as I can for a user to pay for eWrite Lite, download a copy and install on their site quickly and easily.

Wish me luck!

Im about to move this blog and site over to Blacknight hosting. I’ve paid for a small package and I’ll be changing the name servers shortly.

I’ve had some trouble recently setting up blogs on the existing hosting which is using IIS and so I’m looking forward to residing on a Linux server which will enable me to upgrade the blog to version 2.5.1 and enable the friendlier perma links which seem to cause issues for IIS.

Once there, I’ll be continuing to blog about the ongoing developments of eWrite Lite, eWrite Messenger and eWrite Forms more frequently.Who knows, I might end up being featured on Alltop!

I’ve had eWrite Forms running for a good few months now. In short, it’s a service which allows a website owner to replace any form on their site which is being abused by spam messages with a form protected against spam.

It was basic, providing only a few forms. A newsletter signup form, a contact form and a guestbook form. It also needed a website to use PHP on their site to allow them to integrate a form.

This was clearly quite limiting and I’ve been planning up updating this for some time. This week I was supposed to travel for a few days. Partly in relation to work and also to take a day or so for myself for some well deserved rest away from the computer.

Instead, I had an idea to stay home and try to catch up on a couple of projects. I spent a couple of days giving eWrite Forms some attention.

It now allows a user to sign up (for free) and easily create basic forms simply by ticking a few fields which they want to use.

They are provided with a short snippet of Javascript which they place on their site to display the form. The Javascript is much the same as the JS used by Polldaddy to embed Polls and Surveys on a site.

A user can create as many forms as they like. Any form they create is monitored by eWrite forms and prevents it from sending spam to the website owner using plenty of techniques including a users personal white list and a personal black list.

A user gets an email each week showing how many messages passed through the system and how many of them were spam. The legitimate messages pass through to the user as normal and the spam messages are stored in an admin panel where the user can log in at any time to review and release messages if needed. They can also customize the look of their forms using CSS to make it fit in with their site design.

Im especially pleased with these improvements but theres plenty more to add to it. I’d like to charge a small amount for this service, but Im unsure whats an acceptable price.

Some improvements underway are:

• A paid version which will send the form to the owner instantly (The current messages are scanned hourly)
• An RSS feed of messages received from a form.
• A way for the owner to customize the ‘thank you’ message when a form is submitted
• The ability to add any type of field a user wants to a form
• Better Javascript form validation.
• Import/export of emails addresses to and from the white list and black lists

Any ideas or suggestions from bloggers out there? Know anyone that has a website with a form thats sending them spam?

I’ve been thinking of adding a ‘Tip of the day’ sort of note to the dashboard of eWrite Lite that a user sees when logged into eWrite.

With eWrite providing many useful tools to manage a website, I’d like to be able to give users handy practical tips on an ongoing basis in relation to their website content.

Short and useful tips such as:

• Don’t forget to add an email address or phone numbers to your contact information page to allow customers to contact you directly
• Why not place a Google Map on your contact information page to help customers find your business, use http://www.communitywalk.com
• Try to avoid writing your email address on your site. It will prevent web robots from collecting your email address and sending you spam. Create an image with your email address instead.

Can anyone think of a few more ?

When I first saw Walter Higgins’ Pixenate, I knew it would be a great app to have available within eWrite to allow users to easily modify images without the need for expensive applications like Adobe Photoshop.

After some recent “marketing”, asking existing eWrite Lite users if they would like the ability to edit images within eWrite using a Polldaddy Poll, I met with Walter after Cork Open Coffee and he was good enough to give me the latest Hosted Edition of Pixenate to play with.

I’ve spent a few days playing around with it, and contacted Walter a couple of times when I didn’t know how to implement one function or another. He always got back to me with the info I needed and links to the appropriate sections of his online documentation.

I have it running now and I’m going to let eWrite users at it next week. I am using a theme which provides that basic image functionality such as cropping, resizing and rotating. A fraction of what Pixenate can really do.

After what Im sure will be some great praise for Pixenate, I’ll be paying a monthly fee to have Pixenate within eWrite. Worth every penny. Thanks Walter!

I received 5 concepts back from thelogocompany today.  Theres something I like in each one. You’ll probably guess that I mentioned that I like the Thunderbird logo in the forms when I was filling them out.

For now, I’m tinkering around with ideas before I get back to them with enough information to move on. So far, I’m impressed.What do you think ?

draft 1

draft 2

draft 3

draft 4

draft 5

Here is a screenshot of eWrite Lite as it current looks. (Click to enlarge)

Existing clients log into eWrite Lite by going to www.ewritecork.com and logging in via the client login on the top of the site. This may soon change, but thats for a later post.

The screen shot shows the main ‘dashboard’ which is visible when a user logs in. To get back to this screen from any other section a user need only press on the eWrite Lite heading or the little Home image along the top.

This dashboard provides a couple of quick links to various items. The first cool thing is the screen shot of users own website. This is updated any time the homepage of the site it changed. The ability to update this thumbnail is thanks to Picoshot and Thumbalizr.

Next to the screenshot a user can see the total visitors to their site today. eWrite Lite has its own scripts for recording the traffic to the site but also uses Google Analytics to provide much more information and graphs.

Following this there are 5 of the most recently edited pages, these provide a quick link to open the page for editing using the TinyMCE editor. When a page is updated an RSS feed and Sitemap XML file are updated.

Below this a user can see the limits placed upon eWrite Lite. Its limited to 100 pages and 200MBs of storage for images, videos etc. Since eWrite Lite works on the clients exiting hosting these values could change.

On the right the latest couple of blog posts are visible. It is the eWrite News blog which a user can use to keep up to date of eWrite related news or developments.

The poll thats there are the moment is to see if existing users would like to be able to edit their images within eWrite Lite. Ever since I met Walter of Pixenate I’ve been interested in embedding Pixenate into eWrite if possible so that a person could make some changes to their images. It would save them using Photoshop which they probably won’t have with them if on the road.

The main menu on top has 3 buttons representing the primary areas. ‘Content Editor’, ‘Media Manager’ and ‘Support’. When pressed each one has a drop down menu containing only 2 or 3 items each.

The Content Editor section allows a user to open any existing pages or create a new page.

The Media Manager allows users to view all exiting media files such as images, video & audio and upload new files.

The Support provides a link to the eWrite Lite online manual which is currently being worked on to show short tutorial videos on how to use the various aspects of eWrite Lite. It also opens the client’s contact details so they can keep these up to date.

Future development plans

Overall, the plan is to keep eWrite simple and useful but there are still plenty of things I want to do.

Some future goals include stream lining the interface a bit, making moving back and fourth between sections a bit smoother so that a person could being writing a new page, move to another section to read another page perhaps and go back and continue editing the page they were working on.

Im also very interested in the current Mozilla Prism work. I would like to have eWrite Lite available on the desktop for a quick link or to be used offline and sync the pages when online later on.

So thats eWrite Lite as it currently stands. Its just a tad over 3 MB.

All comments and criticisms are welcome, and if anyone would like to meet or see eWrite in action on their site, let me know.