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Sunday, November 29 2009

Evaluating autoresponder/mailing application

By Eric Maziade on Sunday, November 29 2009, 14:02

We're adding auto-responder and mailing list to the list of services we offer.

While we like to develop everything in-house, sometimes its just great to start a package that has everything.

After a few searches on the Internet, I ended up with two most likely contenders - both commercial applications.

One is Mailing List Manager Pro, a reasonably priced open-source package that has most of the features we'd be looking for and sports a professional-looking user interface.

The other one is Oempro, a somewhat more aggressively priced package (though still quite reasonable) that has just about all the features I could ever want. Drawbacks? The user interface is a bit odd - through light-years ahead of most free open-source solutions available. Biggest drawback: closed source (using IonCube/like technologies).

It really is standstill - one is opened, but lacks a few features (proper support of multi-client architecture), the other one has it all, but cuts off from customizing the software ourselves (something that we often get asked).

I have a soft spot for the open-sourcedness of Mailing List Manager pro - they seem to be actively looking for new features to add. If the software grows in the direction we are going for, we might be willing to start with less features.

So, basically, it boils down to the health of both project - Mailing List Manager Pro lacks a visible forum/community to allow us to see if the project is still alive. Its competitor, Oempro, has it all, and shows us traces activity.

I resorted to communicate with both companies - their support will most likely dictate our decision.

3 days gone and still waiting for an answer on both accounts...

If any of you know of a solution we should be looking at, feel free to comment (we'll be making our decision this week).

We're looking for:

  • A solution that we can host ourselves (open source and PHP are plusses)
  • Pro-grade user interface
  • Auto responder / mailing
  • Per-client configuration
  • Per-client templates (global templates a plus)
  • Client service plans (number of mailings allowed per month, etc.)
  • Import / export group list
  • Custom subscription forms
  • Anti-spam features
  • Statistics (of course)

2 comments

Thursday, December 18 2008

Tracking traffic statistics

By Eric Maziade on Thursday, December 18 2008, 18:07

I'm wondering... what are the pros and cons of these engines:

Feature-wise, Google Analytics is awesome. One of the drawback is that its hosted "outside".

I've been using AWStats for awhile. Its cute, but it is very limited in its tools to analyze data and has no tracking options.

Piwik is a new one to me. Seems pretty awesome, but it is also pretty young.

My all-time favorite engine is the one that came with a Website I once ran off GoDaddy - entirely proprietary, of course.

Anyone has experience to share with these (or others)?

2 comments

Thursday, January 24 2008

mod_rewrite cheat sheet

By Eric Maziade on Thursday, January 24 2008, 15:45

Help Guide to mod_rewrite

Just found that, searching on the net for a comprehensive quick-guide to mod_rewrite (again).

mod_rewrite is cool. I used it "often", as in it solves a good number of "beautiful url" problems.

But I say "often" with quotes, because I'm not using it often enough for the syntax to remain in my head.

This is a nice cheat sheet to pin on your wall at work :)

one comment

Thursday, March 22 2007

Tomcat, out of memory under gentoo

By Eric Maziade on Thursday, March 22 2007, 14:09

Sometimes, you just need to give tomcat more than its 64megs that comes out of the box.

There's the nice way to do it under gentoo:

edit /etc/env.d/21tomcat - it should already be there.

Add the following line to it:

CATALINA_OPTS="-server -Xms128M -Xmx256M"

This means you're telling catalina (the tomcat engine) to start with an initial heap size of 128 megs. It also tells it to set its maximal heap size to 256 megs.

/etc/env.d is Gentoo's way of nicely handling global environment variables. But its not all magic. You need to let gentoo know you've made changes.

Run the following command:

env-update

This will regenerate the environment variables. This is neat. But the shell you're currently running doesn't know that. You could log off and log back on, but I've got better.

source /etc/profile

Now, if you run echo $CATALINA_OPTS you'll see the CATALINA_OPTS variable is set to what you put in the environment file.

This is all neat, but tomcat needs to be aware of this as well... so you'll need to restart it.

/etc/init.d/tomcat5 restart

Enjoy your enhanced heap size!

UPDATE 2009/03/27 For people stumbling onto this article - the way to go now is to edit the tomcat configuration file in /etc/conf.d instead.

no comment

Friday, February 9 2007

Making PHP4 and PHP5 coexist on a WebServer

By Eric Maziade on Friday, February 9 2007, 10:04

New open source software is coming out and wants to use PHP5.

Meanwhile, old open source software has been heavily modded and can't be updated to the latest release that has been fixed for PHP5.

And you really don't have the time, resources or willpower to go through a cesspool of community-spewed, fermented, piece of trash code to fix it.

Better let it run under PHP4.

It's a possible scenario.

There are many articles dealing with that theme:

Below, you will find the quick and dirty, step-by-step guide I used to setup the following:

  • PHP4 using mod_php (because the bulk of my PHP needs runs PHP4)
  • PHP5 using mod_fastcgi
  • Then, you can configure paths (or whole domains) to run with whatever PHP version you like.

Continue reading...

no comment

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