Nick Bartlett“Every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.” - Emerson

I’ve used phplist on and off for the past couple years with no problems other than possibly getting my website’s mail server blacklists with ISP’s and a pathetic 5% open rate.  Some of these other sites out there tout very high open rates and delivery rates in the 98% range, which is awesome.  I created a product newsletter email and tested the free trails the sites offered and have shared my opinion below.  In the end, I went with icontact.com over verticalresponse.com because of the lower pricing, especially when the subscriber list reached 25,000 or more.

- Update 4/14/2005. My account was frozen by icontact after 24 of the 8800 emails were flagged by AOL as spam.  I talked to somebody from icontact and even though my email and method of gathering the email addresses was can-spam compliant, it was not up to their standards.  To use their service, I must have an opt in form on my website where they voluntarily, by double opt in, sign up for the mailing.  My customer list had to be removed and therefore I canceled my account.

www.icontact.com

Price: $62.90/month for up to 10000 subscribers

Trial: 15 days and allows you to send an email to 250 subscribers

Recipient Opens: 11%

Comments: The site has a lot of good tools, templates, spam score checker, html and text versions, and graphical reporting of results.  The only thing that annoyed me was the html editor literally took a full minute to save a draft of my html newsletter as I built it and ended up crashing my firefox twice before I gave up.  I switched to using… yes… IE7 and the save process was ten times faster and no more crashing.  I suppose I could put up with IE for creating newsletters with the right company only if I had to.  They also have a nice tool that will convert your html email into a text email for you with the click of a button.  This saves me from having to create a separate text based email.

www.constantcontact.com

Price: $75/month for up to 10000 subscribers

Trial: Allows you to upload a maximum of 100 subscribers.  Once you go over 100, your trial period automatically ends and you must pay.  What they fail to tell you is they’ve already added you to your own subscriber list, so if you upload 100 email addresses like I did, you’ll have 101 and your trial period will end until you make another account.

Recipient Opens: 9%

Comments: I was unable to figure out how to modify the text version of my email.  The site would send a text version, but it would be blank except for your name and address at the bottom, which is worthless.  They don’t have the pretty graph reporting that icontact and vertical response have.

Update 4/1/2009: In the past week I’ve received phone calls and emails from multiple sales reps from this company.  A little annoying since I had to tell multiple sales people that I was no longer interested.

www.aweber.com

Price: $69/month for up to 10000 subscribers

Trial: Their “trial” is really a money back guarantee.  You have to pay up front, then cancel afterwards if you’re not satisfied.  Sorry, homey don’t play that.  You guys just disqualified yourselves.

Comments: Lacking an easy to use, hassle free trial.

www.ezinedirector.com

Price: $20/month for up to 20000 emails

Trial: 249 subscribers/emails

Comments: Interface is not so much user friendly.  After you click submit on one of their forms, you’d expect this page to reload and advance to the next step, but it does not.  The page reloads and a little link appears on the page that you must click to continue.  Annoying.    When you upload your import list you must wait in a queue that processes one import every five minutes.  That right there tells me they don’t have a lot of customers.  Here is a good example of what I mean by bad interface… I was looking for the link to “create email” or something like that so I could paste in my html email.  I could not find this link.  I finally did find it… it was “schedule”.  Why would I click “schedule” if I have nothing to schedule yet? Ok, I created my email and clicked to have it sent.  Apparently it goes through a review process of some sort.   Once I found my way back to the main user dashboard, a message appeared that said my list was over the 249 subscriber limit and that my message would not send.  Dammit!  I was looking for the free trial limit everywhere and could not find it!  I’ve had it with this site.  I don’t even care if it’s free at this point.

Update 4/1/2009. I received three emails from these guys today and two of them were the exact same thing.  One of them was a bill for $19.50 because I had some “complaints” from my mailing list.  Complaints are recorded when somebody’s mail client flags the message as junk.  The second duplicated email is a notice that my “free trial” account has been suspended for non payment.  Give me a break; you guys are a joke.

www.listcast.com

Price: $20/month for up to 10000 emails

Trial: 200 subscribers/emails

Comments: Was not able to import a list of email addresses with the free version.  That’s dumb.  Why give me up to 200 email addresses and make me type them all in?  Also, they insisted that every email address get a confirmation opt in message before I could send to them.  That just disqualified listcast.com.

www.verticalresponse.com

Price: $72/month for up to 8000 subscribers

Trial: 30 days and 100 email max.

Recipient Opens: 11%

Comments:  User interface is very good as I was able to find what I wanted usually with in two seconds.  It has many templates and a “build your own” editor.  It also has the nice copy button where it’ll create a text version of your email with one click.  Very nice.  I was able to upload my list, paste in my email message, and schedule the mailing within 20 minutes.  Very good!  The message is pending a review to ensure it follows the CAN SPAM laws.  They review messages every couple hours, so no big deal.

The look and feel of oscommerce is a bit behind the times as it was created sometime in the late 1990’s.  Yeah, that’s a long time ago.  Back then, browsers were not up to speed with all the CSS tricks, so structure was built on table upon table.  In some places, there is content buried 8 nested tables deep with oscommerce!

This weekend I worked away and launched a new ecommerce site based on oscommerce topfitnesssource.com.  With my other oscommerce sites, I’m always working to improve the look and feel, accessibility, and better search engine rankings.  I spent six hours removing tables from the template and product detail page and had to finally throw in the towel on the 3 column template structure.  My design has images in the left and right columns that must stretch 100% in height with the content andapparently divs and CSS aren’t up to par on that capability yet.  Check out the product detail page and you’ll find just one table http://www.topfitnesssource.com/alr-hyperdrive-30-p-10671.html .

If you intend to strip all the tables out of oscomerce, you’ve got a daunting task ahead of you!  If you don’t have a thousand hours of custom coding into your shopping cart as I do, you might consider a different solution such as prestashop, which comes with a tableless front end.

MS Word 2007 has a ton of options and is pretty cool, but sometimes it’s just a pain in the ass because it has so many options.  I make a lot of bulleted lists to organize data.  For the past week or so MS Word 2007 hasn’t been indenting the next bullet line below the previous bullet when I hit the tab key.  I don’t know why… I probably clicked too fast one day and “POOF” it didn’t work anymore!  I’ve done this a few times before, like with the paragraph settings.   Anyway, here’s how to fix this issue.

1. Click the circularly looking office icon in the upper left corner of MS Word 2007 and then select “Word Options”.

2. Select “Proofing” on the left menu and then select “AutoCorrect Options” on the right.

3. Select the “AutoFormat As You Type” tab and check the “Set left and first indent with tabs and backspaces” checkbox.

As the team lead for the past year, I’ve been playing the role of politician, requirements gatherer, specifications writer, and project manager for VISI’s development team. Requirements and specifications are something completely new to VISI’s development projects since I started taking ownership of them. Upper management has been asking for more quality and this is one of the steps we’ve taken to reach that goal.

I won’t go into detail about how to gather requirements or build a specifications document at this time, but I’d like to inform you how I’m “finalizing” our internal project specifications so we can starting building out the project. Two of the projects I’ve been preparing specifications for have come to a close just yesterday and today. One of them is a small project that is projected to take 8 days to build out and the other is a large project expected to take many months. After many revisions of the specifications document for each project and repeatedly asking for, and not receiving, an approval from the “customer”, who is an internal employee, the revisions just continued creeping in slowly for a couple weeks time.  This is not productive time and is only delaying the project, especially when you have a developer on your team looking for something productive and meaningful to work on.  The project “customer” may have trouble committing to a specification, knowing that changes during the build and after launch are harder to come by. They may also be indecisive for fear of making a commitment and overlooking an important requirement or feature.

Because this is an internal project for the company, I am able to “help” facilitate and keep things moving.  It’s very simple: the company needed this project completed yesterday, so we need to draw the line and get started.  For you sales people out there, “asking for the sale”, or “close”, did not work with these projects.  Therefore, I’ve realized it’s up to me to draw the line and tell them when the specifications are finished.  How do you know when this time has arrived with a project spec? When the change requests and revisions have slowed and decreased in severity to the point where you’d be able to makes the modifications very easily on the fly during the project build.  I’m not saying it’s good to make a bunch of changes to the spec during the build, but they will come inevitably and will never cease, even after the project is completed.   The other important factor is that your team is ready to get started.  If you’re developer for the project is tied up for another month with something else, then there is little need to bring closure to the specification discussion at this time since you know little changes and modifications will forever continue with larger projects.

When it comes to the internal project that is starting to drag on forever, just remind yourself and the internal “customer” that the company needs the project completed and a line must be drawn.

Sorry to say, I don’t have the magic hidden PHP function to do this as the process is a bit more involved.  I built functionality today to download an Excel inventory file for my side business and then have my website automatically read it and update the inventory.  This has been the missing automated link for a while and I’m finally getting around to it.  I won’t go over how to download a file via FTP with PHP in detail, but basically you use the ftp_connect, ftp_login, and ftp_get functions built into PHP.  Below I describe the magic involved with converting an Excel file into a delimited file that your existing code (like mine) can handle.

1. Download Spreadsheet Excel Reader from sourceforge

2. I received an error when testing because the file OLERead.php could not be found.  The path is incorrect in reader.php on line 31. Update it to “require ‘oleread.inc’;” so it includes the oleread.inc file from the same directory.

3. Give my code below a whirl and you’re done.  You can save it to a file as I did or print it to the screen by just echoing the $output variable.

//path and name for inventory file after download
$localFilePath = 'inventory/'.date('Ymd').'_inventory.xls';
 
//init excel reader
$reader = new Spreadsheet_Excel_Reader();
 
//set output encoding
$reader->setOutputEncoding("UTF-8");
 
//read file
$reader->read($localFilePath);
 
//set field delimiter
$fieldDelimiter = "\t";
 
//set row return/delimiter
$rowDelimiter = "\r";
 
//set new file name
$newFilename = 'inventory/'.date('Ymd').'_inventory.txt';
 
//loop through all rows
for ($i = 1; $i <= $reader->sheets[0]["numRows"]; $i++) {
 
	//loop through all columns for this row
	for ($j = 1; $j <= $reader->sheets[0]["numCols"]; $j++)	{
 
		//set field
		$output .= "\"".$reader->sheets[0]["cells"][$i][$j]."\"" . $fieldDelimiter;
	}
	//end row
	$output .= $rowDelimiter;
}
 
//save new delimited file
file_put_contents($newFilename, $output);