I’ve been a Mac user for just about a year now (couldn’t ever go back), but I’ve noticed an annoying little “feature” within Firefox that I was never able to resolve until recently.  While tabbing through form fields, drop-downs are skipped and require switching to the mouse to set a value.

Turns out the issue is pretty simple to resolve.  Go to System Preferences, then select Keyboard.  On the bottom of the window there is a section titled ‘Full Keyboard Access’ (as pictured below).

Simply change the option to ‘All controls’ instead of the default.  This will allow you to tab between all elements on the page.  In addition to drop-downs, you will now be able to focus on links as well.

Tip: The keyboard shortcut Control +F7 will toggle this setting if you prefer to enable/disable it quickly.

A big nod goes to howtogeek.com for this fix.

We’ve tried quite a few open source email marketing solutions from Mailman, to PHPMailer, to poMMo and they all suck for one reason or another.  Here are our reasons why:

1. They are self hosted solutions
In our experience, self hosting email marketing rarely works out well. Most hosting providers have tight limits on how many emails can be sent per hour from a given domain.  A somewhat average limit of 300 emails/hour implies that it would take 16 hours and 40 minutes to email a list of 5,000 addresses.  While that could be acceptable in certain circumstances, it is less than ideal for a big marketing push or product launch.  Hit 10,000+ addresses and you are talking in days, not hours.  No good for us or our clients!

2. They have clunky and non-intuitive interfaces
We’re BIG supporters of open source software, but have yet to see an open source email marketing tool that has been as slick as the likes of Campaign Monitor or MailChimp.  When passing off open source software to a client, pray they are somewhat technology proficient or you have a support nightmare on your hands.  The best client interface we’ve seen to date is poMMo, but it still leaves much to be desired.

3. They lack crucial features for professional use
To be usable by a business with any sizable email address list, an email marketing tool has a few “must-have” features:

• Email throttling
• Intuitive and simple administration interface
• Elegant WYSIWYG email editor (with the ability hand-edit HTML if necessary)
• Automated bounce handling
• Comprehensive analytical tools to measure campaign success

4. There is no strong community
Unlike many other great open source projects, we’ve found much to be desired in the communities for the top open source email solutions.  This makes support and bug fixes a disaster zone.

You tell us…
Have you found any great open source email marketing tools that we have missed? Disagree? Let us hear from you…

10 Comments

In doing a considerable amount of local web development, we often come across the need to modify (or even completely swap out) the hosts file on Mac OS X Leopard.  While it is possible to do this through the terminal, there is a great little tool from Clockwise that works perfectly called Gas Mask.

Features:

• Syntax highlighting
• Simple hosts file switching
• Global hotkeys for file switching
• Automatic flushing of the local DNS cache
• Growl support

Gas Mask is currently at version 0.4 and can be downloaded for free on the Apple Downloads site. Enjoy!

1 Comment

Update: We have been using poMMo for a solid month now with one of our clients and unfortunately we can no longer recommend it as a high-quality piece of email marketing software.  It appears to have been out of active development for some time (Latest release was Apr 03 2008) and while there is a community around poMMo, it’s limited in its ability to support issues.

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While Blue Ember Design does offer its own email marketing solution, we occasionally have some smaller clients that want to use self-hosted email marketing software.  Although not typically advisable, we do allow it for some clients with small subscriber lists (the idea being that it will get them started and they can move over later).

Up until last week, we really were pretty disappointed with many of the open source email marketing software options.  In the past we have implemented  GNU Mailman as well as PHPMailer-ML for our clients, but each of these has their major downfalls.  Mailman just feels way too bulky, takes too much hand editing for configuration, and is a beast for client training.  PHPMailer-ML was simple to configure, but had a pretty clunky interface.  We also ran into some issues with the database connection being dropped while sending leaving us no clue where it left off.  So the search for a great free email marketing solution continued.  Enter poMMo.

poMMo is very easy to configure and has a decent looking, easy-to-use interface.  There is one configuration file that really only required MySQL database connection information and the system is off and running.  It self-installs and does it in a way that it could be run “out-of the box”.  Of course we do customize the HTML emails for our customers, but that was just as easy with its email template feature.

Here are some of the features we like about poMMo:

• Email throttling (by total emails sent and by destination domain)
• Auto generated HTML subscription forms
• Custom field collection (First Name, Last Name, City, State, etc.)
• Groups for mailing a subset of the full subscriber list
• HTML and Text-Only email options
• Email history stored as HTML pages for archiving.  This is great for mail reader issues with HTML.

Known Issues and Desired Features

• There is an issue with the admin interface in Firefox where the body of the content falls below the sidebar.  This is just a small CSS issue that can be fixed with some slight tweaking.
• The system is set up to have an email address that receives bounces, but there is no automated bounce processor.  It would be nice if it could automatically unsubscribe invalid addresses after a set number of bounces.
• When composing emails, poMMo uses FCKeditor to allow for advance editing.  The software doesn’t display the ‘Source’ button to view the email as HTML.  This would be nice for advanced users that want to hand manipulate their email’s HTML.  Just a small hang up =)

16 Comments

As one of the leading tools for website traffic analysis, Google Analytics provides information about website visitors, traffic trends, search engine keywords, and LOTS more.  Google provides a beautiful and easy-to-use web interface, but we wanted a readily available desktop application that was equally useful.  Enter Polaris by Desktop Reporting.

Polaris is an Adobe AIR application which means that it will run on Windows, Mac, and Linux flawlessly.  They offer a free version which allows viewing one account or an upgraded multi-account version for $15/year.

In the image above, you can see that many of the popular reports are right at your fingertips and delivered in Analytics-like graphical reports.

Also, selecting date ranges is available to focus on specific time periods.  This is very convenient for viewing long-term reports as well as daily web trends.

There is even a great map view to show geographical hotspots for website traffic.

We highly recommend Polaris if you are website statistic freaks like us.  It’s a beautiful interface with tons of information right on your desktop.  You can download it now at http://www.desktop-reporting.com/polaris.html.

Image Source: Desktop Publishing