Blue Ember Design » Software

Tab Key Skipping Drop-downs in Firefox on OSX

Garrett St. John — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 17:00:05 +0000

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.

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4 Reasons Open Source Email Marketing Sucks

Garrett St. John — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 17:00:36 +0000

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…

Gas Mask: Simple Hosts File Manager for OS X

Garrett St. John — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:12:02 +0000

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!

poMMo: Open Source Email Marketing Software

Garrett St. John — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:00:05 +0000

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.

——

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 =)

Polaris: Google Analytics on Your Desktop

Garrett St. John — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 14:55:31 +0000

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

Data Backup and Preventing Loss

Garrett St. John — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:00:46 +0000

Computers have been around for quite some time now, but one thing that never goes away is crashed hard drives, house fires, laptop theft, and other “disasters”. If you are anything like us, your computer holds years of family digital photos, an extensive library of music, and important emails. So the question surfaces, are you backed up?

CDs, DVDs, USB Drives

The most simplistic way to back up is by burning CDs/DVDs of your data or copying it to a USB drive. This can definitely work as a primitive form of back up. It’s quick and affordable, but unfortunately it doesn’t scale well at all. Even with the advent of DVD burners, you are limited to 8.5 GB (at best). For some that may work, but if you have lots of digital music and thousands of photos…frankly, it probably won’t work for long. Also, what about when you need to refresh your backups next month? You’ll need a closet dedicated to expired DVD backups.

External Disk Drive

Another great way to back up your most important files is with an external disk drive. This can be a great solution for three reasons:

Hard drives are big – You could hypothetical replicate your entire computer on to an external drive. Or, just copy over the most precious files.
Hard drives are rewritable – No need to have multiple external drives, just write over your past backups next time.
Hard drives are independent from your computer -If your computer gets shocked and your internal drive bites the dust, your external drive is still alive and well. Likewise, if your backup external drive burns out, you still have your functioning computer to create a new back up.

As great as this idea may seem, it’s not without it’s downfalls.

Copying an entire 250 GB hard drive is SLOW – While backing up, your computer is going to slow down significantly for several hours.
This doesn’t protect you from natural disasters – It’s not fun to think about, but if there was a fire in your home or place of business both your computer and your backup aren’t going to make it.

Remote Backup

As far as completeness goes, this is it. Remote backup entails making copies of your files on a server at an entirely different location. Your files are copied over the Internet and stored securely in a server facility. By doing this, you have data redundancy, disaster recovery, and a simply and pain-free backup method.

Our Solution

At Blue Ember Design, we imploy a bit of a hybrid of these methods for a combination of the best data recovery and ease of use.

All development is done on Apple machines running OSX which allows us to use an amazing feature called Time Machine. Time Machine does hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly backups of an entire system. This data can be easily retrieved with a beautiful user interface and is great for pulling back mistakenly deleted files or restoring an entire system. We highly recommend Time Machine if you are running a Mac. But what about disaster prevention?

Blue Ember uses Mozy for automatic remote back up and disaster prevention. They are a great (and affordable service) that offers reliable and secure data backup. File transfer happens automatically in the background and only data that has changed since the last backup is sent to Mozy. This helps to prevent big file uploads and a slow computer. Data is transferred securely with encryption and stored in a secure server facility so your passwords, private documents, and sensitive information are safe. Right now Mozy is offering a free 2GB backup account which is a great way to get started.

As our client, your website files are backed up on a daily basis so that in the case of a server crash we will be able to restore your website with little down time. We also offer daily database backup so that your online store sales information, blog posts, or content management system don’t get lost either.

Regardless of what you choose to do, don’t risk losing your most important files, pictures, music, and more. Get backed up!

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