Expedition Post

E-mail marketing is the best marketing channel whether:

1. you want to brand yourself as an expert
2. get more clients to your services business
3. get repeat business from your existing customers
4. convert  more of your website’s visitors into customers

Today there are a lot of ways to build an audience:

1. You can gather followers on twitter
2. You can write a blog
3. You can create a facebook page and have people sign up to it.
4. Create a myspace profile and get fans and friends who will receive your updates.

We hear a lot of news articles that say email is losing out to SMS, then we heard that email is losing out to social media and so on. Many have started peddling products that claim that social media is the best way to reach your audience and somehow email is falling out of fashion and is losing its effectiveness.

Social Media : Not Suited For All Audiences

These are the “latest” ways to get an audience and keep them. But following a blog through an RSS feed, creating a facebook account and joining a facebook page, creating a twitter account and adding users to it are all not simple tasks for the ordinary internet user. It requires a certain level of internet proficiency.

Lot of people use twitter just because it is the hip thing to do today, because their friends are doing it. It could be something else tomorrow. Remember MySpace? Before twitter and facebook, having a myspace page was the most hip “web 2.0” thing to do.

Social media is not new. It was always there – people were talking on bulletin boards way back in the early 1990s.

Email Will Always Be The Most Important Communication Channel

People increasingly prefer to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to have informal conversations with each other. But that doesn’t mean email is going to become obsolete any time soon.

Email is very deeply ingrained into our work culture and everyday life. Lot of important communication still relies on your email address. Your paypal account, your internet banking notifications, communication from your employer all need emails.

It will always be the most important communication channel because it will always be there. People will always need their email addresses to verify their user accounts which they are opening today and will keep 10 years from now. You can’t replace a communication channel like email with a company/website like facebook.

Sending and receiving an email is the first thing everyone learns when they learn to use the internet.  It has the least learning curve. People will write emails, and check them for a long time to come.

I joined twitter by peer pressure. I didn’t do it because I liked it when I first started using it. I joined facebook because lots of my friends were doing it too. It took me a while to actually *get* what the fuss about facebook really is. Twitter? I still don’t get it. The point is – I’m thinking if a very computerate guy like me can’t get it quickly, it is going to be hard for a lot of people to learn to use these sites.

You can always safely assume that your audience members have an email address. You can always talk to them via email.

Do you ever code for yourself? To solve your own problems?

A lot of satisfaction comes out of being able to solve your own problems when it comes to software.

The real world doesn’t allow you to create matter out of thin air, move things from one place to another with no effort. If you have a backache you must go to the pharmacist and get medicine.

If you know how to create software, you can scratch your own itches. If you can’t afford a particular software but have plenty of time, you can sit down and create it on your own. Theoretically. You may not be able to create your own Microsoft Word 2007 but this works for many real world problems.

WP Responder is one such itch that I had. I couldn’t buy Aweber’s services because it either costed too much or because they didn’t have a subscribe via PayPal option. Just then I graduated from college and had a lot of time on my hands. I got to work on creating a wordpress plugin that will both deliver blog posts and allow me to have a email newsletter.

I needed to create a membership site without spending $180s on a software like Amember. I went to work on Drupal and found the exact set of modules and their configurations that will let me create a paid membership website with unlimited levels.

There will come a time when trying to solve your own problem will start to cost more than buying a readymade solution. Until you get there leverage your programming skills to solve your own problems and get to the next level of financial independence.

First an apology for delaying the release this far. I ran into some serious personal problems that needed my urgent attention. This is why I haven’t been able to release this version on the previously mentioned release date.

In this release, I have added the following features:

• Ability to attach images inline with HTML e-mail – In version one and pretty much everywhere else, HTML e-mails were sent simply by inserting the HTML code in the e-mail and adding the necessary headers. If you had images in the e-mail they would be blocked by almost all e-mail clients and webmail clients today. HTML e-mail specification allows attaching e-mail within the body of the email so that e-mail clients don’t block the images and force you to provide an alternate version.
• Set the number of e-mails that can be sent in an hour – Most web hosting servers limit the number of e-mails that can be sent in an hour. If your server exceeds this limit the host may queue up your excess emails and send them in the next hour like my host (thank you namecheap!) or suspend your account and put up a nasty message for your visitors to see. I have changed the plugin to send a fixed number of e-mails every hour. This limit can be configured under the Settings page in the newsletter section in your admin panel

Previously this plugin used the PHPMailer PHP library. In this version I have changed it to the Swift Mailer PHP Library which I found more suited to this particular application as this library is faster and consumes less server resources. This library also makes a few interesting features that I am planning to implement in the next version much easier which means the next version will be released within the one month.

These are some minor changes in this version. Besides these, this version removes some common bugs in the program.

Download

Download the new version from the spanking new website I’ve created for the plugin:

Features Unimplemented

There are some practical difficulties in implementing couple of features that I had promised earlier so I have decided against implementing them in this version.

Chicklet Generator – Unfortunately I haven’t been able to add the subscriber count chicklet generator in this version because of some difficulties in implementing the feature. The feature turned out to be much more complicated than I imagined it to be.

I don’t want to add a feature without testing it and which may end up causing major problems for your web hosting server.

The chicklet generator is supposed to generate an image file that shows the number of subscribers for a particular newsletter. The subscriber count image is generated by PHP by fetching the subscriber number using a database query. If this query is executed every time the image is loaded, your server could get overloaded and become very slow. The solution I’ve come up with is to generate the image once every day and serve it to the reader for the rest of the day.

Skip sending post by e-mail – In version 1.0 it was possible to skip sending a blog post to e-mail subscribers by checking a checkbox in the "Add New" or "Edit" interface. But there were some bugs that led to this feature causing some major problems with approving comments. I felt fixing this was one hairy mess that is better demolished and built from scratch.

I will be adding more customization fields in the "Add New" and "Edit" pages:

• Customize the e-mail that e-mail subscribers receive for a particular blog post. You will be able to add custom field placeholders while writing blog posts and they will be automatically substituted in the e-mails sent when that post is published.
• Skip sending a blog post by e-mail if it hasn’t already been sent
• See the progress of mailouts – Since the e-mail is sent in batches, it becomes possible to see how many subscribers received their e-mails.

I Need Your Help!

The past two months have been very difficult for me with me having 9 hour hectic work days so I haven’t been able to get much work done on this plugin. But I want you to know I haven’t fell asleep at the wheel. I want to create the best free Wordpress autoresponder plugin that will help anyone build a following without any investment.

I created this plugin to learn how to create wordpress plugins as well as solve a problem that I was facing. There is plently of room for improvement in this plugin.

How you can help?

• File bug reports – If you find that the plugin isn’t sending. I really
• Request features – I am listening. Use the contact form, use the feature request form. I want to know what you need.

Why Is This Not In The Wordpress Repository

Adding this plugin to the Wordpress plugin repository serves absolutely no purpose for me at all. I don’t have patience to endure their long and strict approval process. In my opinion the rules there are geared to help Wordpress.org and the Wordpress brand more than the plugin developer.

Once I submit this plugin to the repository no body who uses it is going to care what happens to the guy who developed it. Users will happily click on the automatic updater and praise Wordpress and write on how convenient it is for them to manage their blog with. Besides, the wordpress people haven’t exactly been nice to wordpress developers.

I really don’t care if my plugin doesn’t meet the Wordpress coding standards or if another Wordpress plugin developer feels like I have verbally abused his mother while reading my source code. This is a very useful software. That is what truly matters. I will be distracted from this goal if I put this plugin in the wordpress directory. I don’t want my freedom to link to someone FROM MY WEBSITE be taken away from me for a entry in the wordpress directory which may or may not bring me anything.

This plugin is my hard work and I am not about to give all the benefits of my work (traffic, recognition, business) to someone else in the name of sharing and openness and community. That is just stupid.

As a result you won’t receive the update messages in the plugin page. I can however give you regular updates and support this plugin if you subscribe to this blog by e-mail or add yourself to the mailing list. As you can tell, I am thoroughly pissed at the Wordpress repository moderators for the trouble I have had to go through to submit a theme in the past.

–End Of Emotional Nonsense Rant

The next version of WP Responder will be released on 21st of November. In the upcoming release:

• Images in HTML emails can be attached as part of an email instead to overcome image blocking features in many mail clients and webmail providers.
• Some bugs in the post skipping has been resolved.
• A chicklet can be added to your sidebar that shows your current subscriber count.
• Hourly e-mail sending limits can be configured to avoid violating email policies of web hosts

I have been receiving emails from many readers regarding this plugin. Looks like I was not alone in needing something like this :)

I have been trying to get this release out quickly but my work has been making it hard to find time for it. If you’ve been reading this site recently, you will have noticed some major changes in the design as well as some bloopers here and there in the content as well. I am revamping the website to cater to a much larger audience.

Major Changes

I have decided to make ExpeditionPost to be about more than just developing websites and programming. I am going to write about my experience creating a self-funded business here. I believe this will be of value to many, especially to readers from India.

Hang on tight!

In the previous chapter we discussed the steps involved in creating flex application. This lesson will discuss actionscript syntax. Actionscript was created by Adobe for their Flash IDE to control 2D animations in flash. The actionscript syntax is very similar to that of Javascript. So if you know Javascript 80% of actionscript you know most of actionscript’s syntax.

In this article I will go into the additional features that are supported by Actionscript.

Variable Declarations

Syntax:

var  variableName;

Sample:

var sample_var = 1;

Variable name rules: Name should not contain spaces, cannot be reserved actionscript keywords like if, for, do, while.

Strings

Strings are assigned to variables using a single quote or double quote.

var name = ‘raj’;
var anothername=”raj”;

Booleans

Booleans are assigned to either true or false. The words are lowercase and are reserved keywords.

var isAMonkey = true;

Strict Data Typing

Although variables are loosely typed it is possible to specify a type for your variables in Actionscript. This is also called variable type annotation. The following statement declares a variable of type Number. You can specify annotations for your own data type declarations also.

var mileage:Number=20;

var Ferrari:Car;

Functions

Functions are defined with the same syntax as Javascript. But actionscript supports specifying return type through type annotations similar to variable type annotations. Shown below are some sample declarations

function findInterest(principal,interest,time):number
{
…
}

Anonymous functions

An anonymous function is the same as normal functions but it is defined similar to declaring a variable.

var testFunction = function() {

doSomethin();

}

testFunction();

The difference is that anonymous functions should be fully defined before being executed but normal functions will get mapped to their definitions even if the definition falls after the part where the function is called.

Flow control and looping

Actionscript supports all the looping constructs that Javascript does:

While loops

while (expression)

{

//do something

}

For Loops

var y:Number=1;
for (var x:Number = 1; x <=5; x++)
{
     y=y*x;
}

Classes And Objects

Actionscript supports classes in a way similar to Javascript. Instead of relying on the function keyword to define functions, actionscript uses the following syntax:

Class Classname
{
   private var varName;
   public function funcName()
   {
   }

}

Here public and private are access specifiers. The first definition within the class is a class attribute. The second is a class method. Instantiating an object:

var newObj = new  ClassName();

If you are familiar with Java you will find actionscript’s syntax of defining classes very similar.

Packages

Packages are used to group related classes together.

package packageName
{

//class definitions

}

Static variables

Static variables are attributes that are defined as part of the class. These variables are not unique to each variable like instance variables. They are accessed by referencing the classname.

class ActionscriptBook
{
 public static pages:Number = 322;
}
var pages = ActionscriptBook.pages;

Getters and Setters

Actionscript supports creating getter and setter functions that control access to class variables.

class  Box {
private var side:Number;
public function get theSide():Number
 {
 return side;
 }
 public function set theSide(theNum:Number):Number
{
 side=theNum;
}
}

In this chapter we have learnt the basic actionscript syntax. In the next chapter, we will learn how to use the various components and how to place them within containers.

In the previous lesson we briefly discussed creating a flex application. In this lesson I will discuss how to create a flex application and walk you through the process of creating one.

Most tutorials and books teach Flex on the assumption that you are going to use Flex Builder to write your flex applications. I prefer to think you will use your own IDE. Therefore, we will focus on making flex UIs using simple text editors like Notepad or TextMate.

Read more…

After a long hiatus from blogging, I am going jump start posting with a post series on Adobe Flex. Flex is very useful to create a web application. In the age of software as a service where more and more web applications are required to look like desktop applications flex is becoming increasingly important.

When you are done with this tutorial you will be able to:

• Spend less time coding user interface behavior which means you can get more done in less time.
• Create user interfaces that look uniform regardless of the browser or operating system
• Save time by not writing browser specific work-arounds
• Create user interfaces that consume less bandwidth and do more with fewer lines of code
• Convert your existing web applications into a desktop application with the same user interface.

Why would you use flex?

• To create user interfaces for your software as a service applications.
• Create web applications which will also have a desktop version that can run in Windows, Linux and Macintosh.
• To create animations in Flash without learning to use Flash CS4.

Flex is a tool used to create user interfaces for applications in Flash. These applications can be desktop applications (like Google Talk) or web applications (like GMail). It is a xml file format like HTML in which you specify where your user interface elements go. Flex programs are written using MXML and Actionscript.

To make a useful flex application that does something when the buttons are clicked, the user’s input has to be processed and an output has to be generated. In web pages this is done using Javascript. In flex applications Actionscript does this. Actionscript does for MXML what Javascript does for HTML – adds behavior to your user interface.

MXML is a convenience language. You can write your flex programs entirely in actionscript. Instead of typing dozens of lines of actionscript code that create the widgets and inserts them under the appropriate parents you can use mxml to layout elements in a logical hierarchy that is easier to read and understand.

Why learn Flex?

Learning flex is advantageous to you because:

• Flex interfaces provide better user experience.
• It is easier to make complex user interfaces like a DataGrid/Accordion in Flex than making them in HTML and Javascript.

Advantages Of Flex Interfaces

In addition to the usual form controls, flex offers additional form controls like rich text editor, color picker, date picker, slider etc.

The flex SDK allows you to create your own form controls. You can add your own customized events and trigger them based on some input condition. It may not sound like much but it is a very useful feature when you want to create complex user interfaces in big projects.

Flex has layout components that give much better control over the size and position of layout controls on a web page. For example – you can position elements and set their dimension relative to the size of the flash canvas.

What can be done with flex?

Here are some examples:

• Create web applications that looks and feels like a desktop application
• Create simple animations and games

What cannot be done with flex?

• Flex produces SWF files that run on your browser in the Flash player so they won’t run in the web server so you can’t create software that runs on the web server using flex.
• Flex programs cannot access files on the user’s computer (when used in the browser). They cannot be used to make applications that store data on the visitors computer.

(However adobe AIR apps made using Flex can)

What do you use to write Flex applications?

Notepad.  You can write your flex applications in Notepad or any other text editor. The programs can be compiled using the Flex SDK which is available for download at no cost here:

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+3

IDE for Adobe Flex
Adobe has created an IDE called Adobe Flex Builder which provides many features such as code completion, drag and drop visual editing, GUI for editing the attributes of the components on the screen.

I recommend investing in a license of Flex builder if you plan to use Flex extensively to make user interfaces as it improves productivity and saves effort. This course will not cover Flex builder so that most readers can benefit from it.

FYI – Adobe provides a free 60 day try-out period for Flex builder. I assume that you installed the Flex SDK.

Creating Flex Applications

Flex applications are written in MXML and actionscript. MXML is a convenience language. When the program is compiled by the Flex SDK, it is converted into equivalent Actionscript code. This resultant actionscript code is compiled into the resultant binary swf file.

Writing the application in MXML is a choice. It is possible to write flex programs entirely in Actionscript too.

Below is a sample MXML file:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"><mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute"></mx:Application>

This file when compiled creates an empty flash file. To compile this file, we use the following command in the command prompt in your operating system.

> mxmlc firstProgram.mxml

This will create firstProgram.swf which we can run to get our result.

In the next article, we will discuss the MXML syntax and the various tags that are available to create a flex application.

For a recent project I needed to customize the feed icon in the Drupal theme I was creating. This wasn’t as straight forward as I thought it would be. Being the drupal newbie that I am I went looking for it in the core templates and suggestions page only to come empty handed.

Previously I found the solution to theming a search form by using the search-block-form.tpl.php template file and thought there would be one for the feed icon too. I found the solution to this in the function reference in the form of a theme hook.

theme_feed_icon($url, $title)

This function is internally called by drupal to generate the feed icon in the Syndicate block. Our Job is to override this function.

Customizing the feed icon

We cannot redefine the same function in our theme so we must define a phptemplate function to override the default implementation.

function phptemplate_feed_icon($url,$title)

What It Must Do?

This function must return the code of the feed icon. Therefore instead of using a image, you may also use a text link as well as hard code a few options such as Subscribe via Twitter and E-Mail.

Therefore, to use your own subscribe by RSS icon, you may use a function similar to the following:

function phptemplate_feed_icon($url,$title)
{
	global $base_path;
	$path = path_to_theme();
 $feed_icon = '<a href=" '. check_url($url).'" class="feed-icon"><img src="'. $path.'/images/rss-header.png" /></a>';
        return $feed_icon;
}

This function is very simple . It just returns a image which is linked to the $url parameter of the function. This function is to be placed in the template.php file.

Summary

• Syndicate feed icon is customized using the theme_feed_icon template function.
• We use phptemplate_feed_icon($url,$title)  in our function to customize the syndicate feed icon block.
• The function should return the code of the syndicate feed block. This code may also include links to other services such as twitter and subscribing by e-mail.
• The function should be placed in your template.php file.

The success of any blog depends on the number of people who are actively reading your blog at any time. To help you get more blog subscribers and monetize your blog, I have been hard at work to create this plugin for the past 15 or so to make it what it is now.

There are many blog subscription plugins available but none of them did what I wanted them to do. They were all limited in features or were paid software, possibly violating the wordpress license which prohibits creating proprietary wordpress plugins.

You might be wondering why would you offer e-mail subscriptions when most people would rather use RSS. Aren’t emails annoying? Not if you do it right.

Why provide E-Mail Subscription when you can just offer RSS?

All blogs on the internet today brovide rss subscriptions. For the top blogs such as Techcrunch and mashable, RSS is the primary channel through which their readers read the blog. However, RSS has some limitations. The most important one I see is control. Being able to customize who gets what message.

• RSS Isn’t Suited To Every Blog’s Audience Outside the world of technology blogs and other blogs that have a tech-savvy audience, providing RSS feeds is simply not enough. Asking them to find and learn to configure a RSS feed reader may be too much of a learning curve just to stay updated with your blog. The medium should not stand between you and your subscribers. E-mail is a very basic application. Anyone who knows how to user the Internet knows how to use e-mail.
• RSS Feed E-Mail Services Aren’t EnoughServices like FeedBlitz and FeedBurner provide e-mail subscriptions for a blog’s content via E-Mail. They allow blog subscribers to subscribe to your blog via email. But these services cannot be used to send email to your subscribers without making a post on your blog. Although Feedblitz provides the e-mail broadcast feature on a paid subscription. This is essential if you would like to market your products and services to your blog readers.
• RSS Can’t Filter Recipients – As your readership increases, you will find yourself writing on general topics. The blog becomes less and less relevant to an individual with a specific interest as the reader. This subscriber may only be interested in posts that you file under a specific category. Some posts are better given delivered by e-mail to a small subset of your subscribers.
• RSS is just one channel to reach you – RSS is just one channel through which people can reach you. You can’t make a posting about
  

  Prospects Need Repeated Exposure To Your Message To Become Customers

Most prospects (who in this case are blog susbcribers) will not buy from you on the very first exposure to your advertisement or sales pitch. They must be exposed to your message 5-7 times before they buy from you.We cannot send these repeated messages through blog posts as our blog will begin to feel like a sales pitch and will make us lose subscribers.

This is the motivation to create WP Responder.

What is WP Responder?

Below is the features of this plugin:

• Create Unlimited Number Of Newsletters – Apart from delivering blog posts to subscribers, you can create newsletters that are meant to be exclusively used for building a audience.
• Create Unlimited Followup Autoresponders – Usually newsletter subscription plugins support only creating newsletters to which you must send broadcasts manually. With the WP Responder, you can create followup messages to get your prospects ready to buy your product or build a loyal following via E-Mail.
• Create Post Series – For the longest time, creating a post series has been the way to increase blog subscribers. But most bloggers don’t promote their post series after they have finished up the series. This feature allows you to offer subscribing to a post series (posts filed under a certain category) by e-mail delivered at regular intervals such as once in 2 days.
• Much More – There are many more features you should look at that will be help you build a readership for your blog if you have one. This blog is currently using this plugin for e-mail subscriptions. The plugin is available for free download here: Click here to download.

Until now the only way to create your own forms was by creating a plugin or hack the core of the content management system. Drupal however has a community created module that allows anyone to create a form on a website. The form can either send the entered data to your email address or save it in a database or both. There are a number of reasons why you will need to create a form. Here are some examples:

• Create a Bug Report form for your buyers or users for your software
• Register for an upcoming event.
• Submit content to the website
• Add a help desk to your drupal website

When the form is filled out, we may want the entries to be

• Sent to us by e-mail
• Save to the database

One can create a form in drupal without any coding knowledge. This tutorial shows how to create a registration form using drupal. In this tutorial we will be creating a academic research paper registration form. The form will take the name, number of participants, the event they want to attend, the name of their college, number of participants, brief abstract, and the files that show the full paper of the event.

I have chosen this form because this demonstrates the many commonly needed form field elements – one line text fields, multiple selection fields, radio buttons, multi line text areas and file upload fields. I assume that you already have a installation of drupal somewhere. If not, read my earlier article on the steps to install drupal on your shared hosting server. Our form will have the following fields

Step 1: Download webform module from drupal.org.

Webform is the module we are going to use to create forms. This module adds a new content type of “webform” which will be our form. The webform module can be downloaded here..

Step 2: Enable the webform module.

Upload the modules files to the [website root]/sites/all/modules directory. The modules directory may need to be created if it doesn’t already exist. To learn how to install drupal modules, read my artilce on the same topic here.

Step 3: Create New Form

Enter the menu settings for the form where you can specify in which menu you want a link to this form to appear along with its link text. Then specify the form name, public description that appears above the form, and the text to show after the form has been filled.

Click to enlarge

Next specify to which e-mail address the content of this form is to be sent along with the subject, from address that is seen in the e-mail received. If the form will be used by registered users you can also specify how many times a user is allowed to register the form.

Click to enlarge

Finally specify the text that is on the button such as “Register” or “Save” or “Submit”. Under comment settings, make sure you disable the form as it would look awkward and confusing to have a comment field below the registration form.

Create New Web Form

Click on Create Content link on the navigation menu click on Web Form

Enter the form’s information such as name and the email address where the form’s information is to be sent when it is submitted by the user. It is also possible to customize the validation of the form.

Click on image to enlarge

Step 4: Create the form fields

When you click save, you will now see a empty list. You can now start adding form fields to the form. Enter the appropriate field name in the name field, select the appropriate type in the type column, specify it it is an email and if this field takes an email address and click Add.

Click to see enlarge

Having created the form’s page, now you can add its form fields

In the resulting form, enter the name, default value if any, the description to be given for the and optionally the width, maxlength, label to be placed before the textbox and after the textbox. There is a section for advanced settings if you want to customize the field further.

Click to enlarge

Enter the name, select the type of field, specify if the field is mandatory and specify if this field is an email address.

Create form field form. Enter name, brief description, a default value if applicable.

Do the same for the name, email, title and college name fields.

The participants field is given a limit of 1-3 participants so we should make it a drop down selection box allowing the user to select the number of participants. For the number of participants field, select the field as the type. Once you click Add, you will see a textarea labeled ‘Options’. Enter the options one in each line.

Enter the options you want to display in the drop down field. Make sure you check the

Listbox check box to display the options as a select item instead of a set of radio boxes.

In this case we are going to enter 1,2 and 3 each in its own line.

For the research paper files field we choose a field of type file and click Add.

Click to enlarge

Now we’re presented we have an option to specify the acceptable file types of this field. I have selected doc, pdf, odf, html, rar, bz2, gz and zip and specified a upload limit of 800kb. Save the form field.

Now click publish to see the form. When you fill the form out and click submit, sends the following e-mail to the e-mail address we specified in step 3.

Closing Notes

Using the webform module anyone can create a webform. Even non-programmers can create forms for their website using this method.