Sending Reliable Email with Postmark
Reliable email delivery is important to your business: your website probably has a contact form for hiring inquiries; your web application(s) rely on email for interaction with your clients, heck, you might even rely on your server to send email for e-commerce transactions. If those emails do not reliably reach you or your (prospective) customers, [...]
Email Reliability: use an SPF record
A while back I outlined my system for preventing comment spam. One of the core fundamentals in there is that I send people an email to verify their email address before their comment is published. For this to work well, I need to trust on my email to be received. As it turns out, email [...]
Turn your commenters into subscribers!
Only a small percentage of your visitors leave a comment. This group of people is probably also interested in subscribing to your newsletter, if you have one. So I created a method to add a “subscribe to my WordPress newsletter” checkbox to my comment form a couple of weeks ago. The result? 40 new subscribers [...]
Preventing anonymous comments in WordPress
I value comments a lot, in fact, I look at the number and quality of comments on a post almost as much as I look at the number of shares, tweets and pageviews to determine how well a post was received. Recently I’ve done some posts that got a lot of annoying responses. Most of [...]
Gravity Forms on Press This
Last night, Carl Hancock of Gravity Forms was my guest on the 3rd episode of Press This. We discussed what this awesome new plugin does, how they went about developing it and a whole lot more. If you’re interested, listen to the show, or read the transcript. I wanted to talk a bit more about [...]
Excluding a blog category from your feed
While I was working on a new system for my WordPress newsletter, a system that uses its own custom feed (skipping FeedBurner which caused errors last week), I had to figure out how to exclude a category from my blogs regular feed as well as my homepage and some other pages. There’s a couple of [...]
Postbox, an interview with Sherman Dickman
A short while ago I moved over to a new email program called Postbox, and I’ve been absolutely loving it for it’s labelling, archive and search functions. One of the people involved with Postbox is Sherman Dickman, whom I knew from when he was still the Product Manager at Mozilla, so I decided to interview [...]
Switching from plain text to HTML emails
Recently, I switched my WordPress News mailing-list from plain text to HTML. There were a couple of reasons for that: I use a lot of links, and these were breaking up even a simple text layout, and I figured HTML email would increase the readability of the whole thing. With HTML emails, because you’re seeing [...]
Several plugin updates and a new plugin!
I’ve had a good few days of coding, and updated several plugins today, all for different reasons explained below, and also written a new one, email commenters. Of course I used this chance to update all links in these plugins and in these plugins pages on WordPress.org. Check out what I did!
Annoyances and weird stuff
So somebody copied virtually all the code from my robots meta plugin, put it in a “Platinum SEO” plugin, and conveniently forgot to attribute the code to me… The GPL isn’t that hard to deal with, but somehow, people manage to fuck even that up. I’ve emailed them and posted a formal complaint to the [...]
