I wanted to talk a bit more about Gravity Forms though. I have my own contact form plugin, and yet, I have decided to go with Gravity Forms for all the contact forms on this site, and it's now the only contact form we use for all our client projects.

It is that, for several reasons. Most important: it's bloody easy to use. No programming needed anymore if the client wants another line of input added, needs a captcha or a file upload, wants a drop down or even wants people to be able to submit content directly to the site through a form.

Second: it stores all contact entries in the database, and has an easy to use interface to search through and export them into something like, for instance, a csv file. This way, if the notification email goes wrong, there's still a copy on the server.

There's loads more, as I said, both my contact form and my hire me form are now built with Gravity Forms, so I can only say: go get it. Carl was so kind as to leave a promo code especially for Press This listeners, which I don't think he'll mind if I share here: use PRESSTHIS as a coupon code for an instant 20% discount!

Gravity Forms on Press This is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

There's a couple of ways to go about this, but what I decided to do was the following:

function mail_feed_query($query) {
	if ($query->is_home || $query->is_front_page) {
		$query->set('cat','-120');
	}
	return $query;
}
add_filter('pre_get_posts','mail_feed_query');

(120 is the category ID here)

This filters out the query from the home page and/or front page of your blog. Now you'll need to do a bit of extra work to prevent it from showing up in category listings, everywhere you do a get_categories or wp_list_categories you just add &exclude=120 (where, again, 120 is the category ID).

So as of next week, my WordPress newsletter will be having its own unique articles again, as well as all the articles in the WordPress category. So, subscribe, like, now, so you don't miss any of the goodness!

One of the things I intend to send out only to my newsletter subscribers is the new plugins I come across that I like or find useful, so if you don't subscribe to the newsletter, you're really missing out.

Excluding a blog category from your feed is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Hey Sherman, can you give us a short introduction of yourself and your work experience?

I first started working in the software industry at really terrific company called Broderbund, where I worked in the product management group on titles such as "Prince of Persia 2" and "Where in the USA is Carmen Sandiego." After Broderbund, I was a program manager at Apple for several Mac OS technology components, including AppleScript and OpenDoc. I then spent seven years at Sun Microsystems in the Java Software group, where I was the product management lead on J2SE 1.4.

A desire to get back to user-facing software led me to Mozilla, where I met my co-founder, Scott MacGregor. We realized that we shared a similar vision for email and productivity, and from that, Postbox was born.

Can you tell us what Postbox is?

Postbox is a new desktop email application that dramatically improves the way people find, use, and organize email messages and content. We’re currently in public beta for our 1.0 version, and anyone can download the beta from our website.

What made you dive into creating Postbox?

Advanced Search

We didn’t feel our software tools were doing enough to help people stay productive. We’re literally drowning in information, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to make sense of it all. For example, we found that many people simply keep everything in the inbox, essentially living out of their inboxes because it’s too much effort to keep everything organized within folders.

And while message volume is certainly a contributor to overload, we also found that messages were being used for functions they were never designed to support. We leave messages in our inboxes because they remind us of things we need to do, or because they contain a document or a piece of information. How many times have you emailed a message to yourself, and did that feel like an elegant way to work with email?

We’re building Postbox so that people can spend less time managing email, and more time using email to get stuff done.

What are the main reasons for people to switch to Postbox?

We can save people a lot of time by providing very fast ways to find and use messages and content. In Postbox, you can get instant access to all of your files, images, and links in just one click, and then perform useful actions on the content that you’ve found. For example, if a relative asks for more recent family photos, simply hit reply and search through all images stored within your email – directly within your message reply window.

Message Compose with Attachment Search

We also make it easy for people to organize messages by topic, which essentially creates a lightweight activity space to work within. People can quickly assign a topic to a group of messages, and then jump into that topic to get stuff done. This allows people to stay focused on just one thing at a time, while minimizing interruptions from unrelated messages. Topics can also be combined with Postbox search to get faster access to the content that is most relevant to your current activity.

Finally, because we’re a desktop application and do everything locally, you can use Postbox with either your work or home accounts, while maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of your email information.

What's your business model?

We're currently evaluating a variety of options, but no decisions have been made to date.

What are some of the features you will be adding in the near future? Are you guys going to offer email hosting like RackSpace perhaps?

We have some great features in the pipeline, but in the near term, our Beta 10 release will contain a new way to add custom signatures to your messages. You can create a variety of rich HTML signatures, and then quickly select which signature you would like to use directly within a new message window. It's pretty slick, and it actually turned out to be kind of fun to use.

We'll also be adding in support for additional content types to search for, and we'll be providing new ways to view, organize, use and share this information within email and online.

Any closing thoughts?

Postbox works great with any POP or IMAP account, so I would encourage everyone to try it. We're still in beta, so there's a lot of active development going on. Since we release a new version about every three weeks, there's always something new to check out.

Thanks Sherman for your time, and everyone, go try Postbox!

Postbox, an interview with Sherman Dickman is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

• 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 normal link text, it doesn't look so bad when you're tracking clicks, which you are of course doing to improve your newsletter.
• HTML email plain looks better, and gives a better opportunity to brand yourself.

In the process of switching to HTML, I've learned a couple of things. I must say the first thing I've learned is that people don't really seem to mind getting HTML email, I've had 1 serious complaint and about 5 dozen positive reactions of people saying this hugely improved the newsletter.

The funny thing is that the 1 serious complaint taught me something new: my newsletter wasn't showing up very nicely in Yahoo! Mail, and the guy was right on to complain to me. Turns out, a lot of web based email readers don't like external style sheets. The solution is simple: use only inline styles.

Now that might seem like a lot of work, but it isn't because of this great tool called Premailer. That absolutely great tool allows you to make up your newsletter in HTML, and then it parses it and moves it all to inline styles. In the same process, it'll also created a decently looking text version!

So I based my design on one of these templates provided by Campaign Monitor, and got my buddy Christian to design this header image for me:

So what I've done now that I've got a finished template is perhaps a bit geeky, but I love it: I've set up a special WordPress blog, with the email template as it's template. I've reversed the post order in it, which you can do by simply doing this:

// Reverse post order
query_posts($query_string . "&order=ASC");
while (have_posts()) : the_post();

And now I can use my favorite external editor, MarsEdit, to write posts for my mailing list. I tag each post with it's edition number, and when I've got enough stuff for a new edition, I open up that tags page, save the HTML, put it through Premailer and then copy the parsed HTML from Premailer into my Aweber broadcast. As Premailer also provides the plain text version, I copy that in too, and I'm done!

By the way people have asked me why I use Aweber, and to be honest I haven't tried anything else. This is what most pro's I know use, it's pretty cheap, it's very good, and it gives me everything I need, so why go look somewhere else?

All in all, this has been a pretty smooth experience, and my newsletter has gotten better from it, so I would advice any of you who sent out text only emails to start doing HTML too!

Switching from plain text to HTML emails is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Sociable 2.6.7

• Renamed Sk*rt to Kirtsy
• Added designfloat
• Fixed the descriptions

Slideshare 1.1
I recoded the SlideShare plugin to make it use the Shortcode API, which made the code 25% smaller.

Permalink Redirect 1.0
This plugin had an issue where it made it impossible to look at preview pages, which I've fixed. I've also uploaded the plugin to WordPress.org.

Blog Metrics 1.1
Fixed a few divisions by zero when authors had 0 posts, or when there weren't any trackbacks.

Comment Redirect 0.1
No fixes, but I did upload this plugin to WordPress.org for the first time, so auto update should start working for this plugin as well.

Robots Meta 3.0.3
Thanks to Henryk Gerlach, a noarchive option was added to Robots Meta.

New: Email Commenters 0.1
Sometimes you want to email all people who commented on a certain post. This plugin gives logged in admins an easy way to do that by adding a mailto: link to do just that underneath each post.
Update: this plugin has already been added to the WordPress plugin repository as well!

Several plugin updates and a new plugin! is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!

Another nice thing a friend pointed me at today is that if you're sending out email, at all, and you host or register your domains through GoDaddy, you might be in for some pain. Apparently, they can take your domain hostage if someone files a spam complaint... GoDaddy never had the best reputation, but this is another reason to urge you to switch away from them.

Annoyances and weird stuff is a post from Joost de Valk's Yoast - Tweaking Websites.A good WordPress blog needs good hosting, you don't want your blog to be slow, or, even worse, down, do you? Check out my thoughts on WordPress hosting!