Developing eWrite

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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?

I placed an ad on facebook for 10 days to run from July 15^th to July25th. I specified that I would pay 1 Dollar for a Click and that the maximum I would pay per day would be 10 Dollars.

There were a few differences in the number of clicks when I compared Facebook ad details to Google analytics so I went investigating.

Unfortunately, I don’t have access to the logs from Blacknight to allow for a third source of data, logs are kept only for 5 days. If I advertise again on Facebook, Ill include my own scripts to log traffic data too.

A chart of the Ad clicks according to Facebook ad manager and Google Analytics.

According to Facebook Ad manager, the ad was clicked on 66 times. The ad ended on the 25^th but it tells me the ad was still clicked on on the 26^th which is nice.

The numbers in red show the days where Facebook ad manager and Google Analytics disagree about the number of clicks and visits. 8 of the overall 13 days for a 10 day ad campaign show different numbers

On the 15^th, my site was changing hosting over to Blacknight so that probably explains the difference of 3 visits that day. The site may not have loaded correctly for the user that day and so Google probably didn’t record the visits properly.

On the 26^th and 27^th, I don’t know why Facebook still had the ad going on the 26^th, I got charged for it which went over the free 100 dollars I gots from the VISA application and my credit card was charged accordingly.

Facebook charge of €13.21 on AIB 24 Hour banking

According to Google, I received 2 referrals from Facebook on 26^th and 27^th. Based on a comment from John O’Connor that never occurred to me, most likely the 2 referrals on the 27^th is a result of 4 visitors on the 26^th and they didn’t navigate away from the site or close the site until after midnight. Its a pity I cant see specific times on Google. Perhaps the exported reports from Facebook ad manager will tell me, but I can’t open it properly at the moment since the .xls file messes up when I open it in Open Office.

For the rest of the days, I can’t explain the differences between Facebook ad clicks and Google analytics visits.

In total, I was charged 120 Dollars for the ad campaign. I assumed (incorrectly?) that I would only be paying if the ad was clicked so according to the clicks shown above I should only have to pay 66 Dollars as it was 1 dollar per click.

I told the Ad manager I would like to spend no more than 10 Dollars per day so it seems I was charged the full 10 Dollars per day regardless of the number of Clicks.

Has anyone else advertised on Facebook? If you’re considering it, read Damien Mulleys tutorial on Advertising on Facebook and read Alexia Golez’s post about getting money for free to advertise.

I recently wrote about moving to greener pastures, virtually speaking. This blog is now hosted with Blacknight.

The reason for the move is that my previous hosting was on Microsoft Windows servers and simply put, it didn’t work.

Any Wordpress version above version 2.3.1 resulted in plenty of errors, blank screens upon logging in, not being able to use pretty permalinks, categories not loading etc. And not just on my blog.

The site is now hosted on a linux server and its running beautifully. I’ve been able to upgrade Wordpress to the latest version without problems and I’ve enabled pretty permalinks.

I changed over the hosting on Tuesday, which I stupidly timed with creating my first advert on Facebook for eWrite Lite. The ad created plenty of clicks and plenty of them might have received a blank site thanks to my own fantastic timing as the site changed over to BN DNS name servers. But thats for a later blog post

For now, Thank you Blacknight! I’m recommending customers using eWrite Lite CMS to use Blacknight hosting.

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!

Tomorrow morning I will be emailing a potential client who wants to use eWrite for their website to tell them I can’t help them.

Their site is using ASP.NET and Microsoft SQL Server. I currently only have eWrite Lite using PHP and mySQL.

So my options are to let them know that I don’t have a version of eWrite that will work on their site or else try to get them to host their site with Blacknight.

I’ve contacted their service provider in England. They don’t have mySQL or PHP on their servers and don’t plan to any time in the future. Bummer.

Im fairly sure they won’t want to change their site hosting as they have a close relationship with their current providers and also have other website related databases hosted there.

To add insult to injury, when I demoed eWrite Lite to them they expressed an interest in franchising eWrite Lite in relation to a web design company they are involved in. This would be great for eWrite Lite but alas I don’t think they’ll be jumping up and down about it right now.

As a result of this I’m wondering should I build a .NET version of eWrite Lite? I worked with ASP long before I worked with PHP and so getting into .NET wouldn’t be beyond me. I’m out of the loop on MS stuff though so wondering what costs I will be facing if I go down this road. Do I need a licence of any kind to write .NET apps? Can anyone recommend a good IDE for .NET ? I wonder is there an app out there to convert PHP code to .NET code which might save some time