WP Responder v4.9.1 Updates

I have been getting a lot of e-mails from users of WP Responder reporting that they are seeing bugs in the plug-in. Most of the time it is something they are doing wrong. But other times there is some problem with the plug-in that I did not foresee when developing the plug-in.

Some bugs that I have been hearing about:

1. Autoresponder Sends Multiple E-Mails: The autoresponder feature seems to send multiple follow-up e-mails to the same person.
2. New Broadcast Doesn’t Work – I am told that the new broadcast feature in WP Responder doesn’t seem to work.
3. No Menu Options – After installing WP Responder you are not able to see any menu options to start using the application. I suspect this is because you are using PHP4 instead of PHP5. WP Responder has been developed to work only on servers running PHP5.

You can rest assured knowing that I am testing and removing bugs from WP Responder as much as possible. Just like any other software, there will be bugs. Rest assured that I will be removing all of these errors in the coming version(s).

To be honest with you, if you are reading this article right now, you are a better person to test this software than I am. It doesn’t matter who you are. I don’t mean to say I am very poor tester. At my vocation, I am a software tester. The reason – Because I am the person who developed this application, it is not as easy for me to discover the bugs in it. As a developer my goal is to make a program work. Not to try and make it break which is what testing is all about.  – to start with the assumption that there are errors in the application and then to try and remove them.

You would be doing me a big favor to me and yourselves if you can find and report as many bugs as you can. You can e-mail the bugs you find to this address:

flarecore@gmail.com

In other news

Your favorite plug-in developer received his order of a very expensive book on WordPress plug-in development and another on marketing:

That’s the DELL laptop that created WP Responder for you. Seriously! No other computer was used other than that laptop to create WP Responder. A lot less time will be spent hunting the WordPress Codex and spamming the WP-Hackers mailing list for solutions to problems. :-)

WP Responder 4.9.1 Released

The eagerly awaited update for WP Responder is now available. You can download the latest version of WP Responder here:

You can also install the plugin using the Add New button in the Plugins section of your WordPress Adminisration Panel.

What’s New In This Version?

1. It’s not broken (mostly) – The previous versions of the plugin had some big flaw or the other. I’ve found a lot of bugs and errors since the last release and have fixed them in this version. This version is the first stable and reliable version of  WP Responder.
2. Updates Notification – WP Responder is a very important plugin. I can proudly say it is one of the MOST important plugins in your blog right now. It is important that you keep it updated and running smoothly as soon as updates become available. So I’ve added a means to notify you of updates.
3. 3. Tutorial Series – This version supports a tutorial series. After you activate the plugin you will start receiving tutorial articles by email on how to use the plugin. This tutorial is fetched from my server and delivered from yours. I have disabled the tutorial delivery feed temporarily so you will not receive any at the moment.

What’s Next For WP Responder?

The plugin will see a lot of improvements to the existing features. Here are some of the improvements you can see in the future:

1. Customization of Broadcast Recipients – The customization of a broadcast will be revamped completely. The current interface is very confusing and unclear. I have some good ideas on how this can be done so that it is most user-friendly.
2. 2. Revamp Of Subscriber Management Features – The subscriber management interface can be improved. A lot more good features can be added and provide more control. 
3. 3. Analytics – Who opened your previous broadcast? What are the subscription and unsubscription trends for newsletter B for the past one month? Where do people subscribe to your website from? And much much more.
4. 4. Automatic Widget Generation – WP  Responder will add widgets to your Widgets page that will add a subscription form to your sidebar.
5. 5. Subscriber Count Chicklet – The ubiquitous subscriber count chicklet will be generated by WP Responder.
6. 6. Automatically Move Subscribers – If subscriber subscribes to newsletter B while already being subscribed to newsletter A, then the subscriber will be unsubscribed from newsletter A.

These are some good features that I can think of on my own. If you are feeling the itch for some feature please let me know. None of this will be possible without your support.

Bugs

WP Responder was coded while listening to Rammstein. If there are any bugs in it its this guy’s fault:

Please report all bugs to me at flarecore@gmail.com

This plugin would not have been possible without the help of the awesome guys who answer questions at the wp-hackers WordPress mailing list.  Special thanks to Otto – the  hacker who is always the first to give a response in that list.

More WP Responder Release Updates

I spent the better part (actually all of it) of my weekend on finding and removing bugs from WP Responder. There have been more problems in the plugin that I previously thought. I just couldn’t get myself to release the plugin knowing that these bugs exist in the plugin.

Some other bugs I have recently found and removed:

• In the new e-mail broadcast page, clicking on disable WYSIWYG editor and then click on enable again creates an additional text box below the WYSIWYG editor.
• All kinds of email delivery such as broadcasts,  blog posts, post series, autoresponder series are delayed by [offset of the timezone at which you - the user is  located].
• When the subscriber subscribes to your newsletter the Subscription Confirmed e-mail does not have the link to the manage subscription page (reported by a user).
• When you schedule a broadcast and then try to reschedule it, it always says you are trying to schedule the broadcast in the past.
• When you schedule a broadcast with HTML disabled and then edit the broadcast again, the HTML is shown to be enabled.
• When you select the attach images option in the new broadcast page, the settings is not saved and is set to enabled always.

What’s New In WP Responder 4.9.1?

I know I said there will be no new features in the plugin but a little foresight demanded that I implement these two features.

Update Notifications

Some of the users of WP Responder have been downloading the plugin from the WP Responder website. Some of you have been downloading it from the WordPress plugin extend website. Currently it is not possible for me to issue updates on the plugin to all of you. So I have implemented a new feature to automatically check for a new update periodically with my server and then notify you by e-mail when an update is available.

Tutorial Series

Apart from the update notifications I have also implemented a tutorial series feature. The plugin will automatically send you a series of articles by e-mail showing you how to use it and get the most out of it after you activate it. Optional of course.

When Will I Release This Plugin?

Some time this week. There is still a lot of testing  to be done. I anticipate the testing and debugging to be finished this week completely.

I want this plugin myself!

Here’s the strange thing. I am dying to get started using this plugin. This plugin is beginning to get awesome even for me. There is so much I can do with it. I am sure you are looking forward to it too.

Look forward to it! Stay tuned!

Release Of WP Responder 4.9 And The Next Version

I released WP Responder v4.9 last week.  And it has been one swell week ever since. Since I released the version 4.9 of WP Responder last weekend I have found many more bugs. Please read on.

Plugin Directory Name Mayhem

I was very optimistic and very happy with the WP Responder release I made last week. Little did I realize the number of bugs that were in the release as a result of the unforeseen directory name. You see, I wanted to make sure that those who wanted the plugin will be able to find it without any difficulty so I choose a really long name that is very descriptive of the plugin’s features.

Last year when I started making this plugin I implemented many features counting on the plugin being stored in:

 /wp-content/plugins/wpresponder/

When submitting the plugin to the WordPress directory I used the really long name. They replaced the spaces with hyphens and made that the directory name when creating the SVN check in account. That is not the only problem in this plugin. The WordPress MU installations may not use the above mentioned path for the plugin directory.

Drag And Drop Of Widgets Interface Fail

The drag and drop widgets interface are found to not work when WP Responder 4.9 is enabled. This is because jQuery UI seems to get loaded into the page when it is not required causing a clash. I have removed this bug in the upcoming version.

The solution for the time being:

1. Deactivate WP Responder.
2. Use the plugins interface to modify the widget layout
3. Reactivate WP Responder

Other Known Bugs Are:

1. Preview email button doesn’t work – The preview email button in the New Broadcast page will not work as a result of the plugin name mismatch
2. Customization of recipients doesn’t  not work – Again because of the plugin directory name mismatch.
3. Images in the WP Responder dashboard will not load – ditto.
4. Deletion of a mailout will not work – Once you create a email mailout you will not be able to delete it. Same reason as above.
5. Import/Export Subscribers – Import and Export of subscribers will not work.
6. Some Short Codes On The New Post Page Don’t Work – The [!delivery_date!], [!post_url!] , [!post_date!] short codes do not work.
7. Activation Errors: You will see a message mentioning that the plugin generated 2096 characters of unexpected output.
8. Unsubscription doesn’t work – The unubscription and subscription management URL in email broadcasts and the other outgoing email will not work as it points to a URL that doesn’t exist. Readers will not be able to unsubscribe.
9. Subscription Confirmed e-mail doesn’t have a unsubscription link – When newsletter subscribers verify their email address, the email that is sent immediately on confirming th email will not have the required subscription management option.

All of these bugs will be fixed in the upcoming version.

WP Responder Works Only On PHP 5+

I received a few emails from users who have seen some basic syntax errors when activating WP Responder. These are because the plugin uses some features of PHP 5. Particularly the SwiftMailer library which is used by WP Responder to send all e-mail works only in PHP5.

WP Responder doesn’t support PHP 4.

Please get your web hosting company to upgrade your server. PHP4 is no longer actively developed. There are even many security bugs that are well known but will not be patched. The core PHP project members have stopped working on PHP 4.

What Have I Learnt From All This?

1. To use subversion. A plugin developer gets this for free in the WordPress repository.
2. Do not hard code the path to the plugin.

What is coming up?

1. WP Responder 4.9.1 will be released in this weekend
2. A new website will be available at WPResponder.com

I am working on it

You can rest assured that I am identifying the problems in the plugin and am removing them. Instead of making a hasty release with a whole new set of bugs to remove, I am working on making the next one a stable release. For now I am working on removing the bugs in the existing features before moving on to implement new ones. So the next version will not have any new feature. Nevertheless I am sure you are eager to start using the WP Responder plugin even with its current feature set.

Stay tuned!

WP Responder 4.8 Release And Related Updates

I released version 4.8 of WP Responder . Since then I have received may emails from users of the plug-in regarding problems in the plug-in. It has been one hell of a week for me. I have seen more than a 1000 downloads for the plug-in in less than 5 days.

What’s New In This Version

Below is a brief layout of the new features in this version:

1. HTML Email Templates
2. External SMTP Server Facility For All Outgoing Email
3. Customize Email Sent Out For Blog Posts

Missing Confirmation Link Download Problems

Many users have emailed me saying that when they filled out their name and email address in the subscription form on the plug-in website they received an email that did not have a email address verification URL. This happened almost entirely in Gmail email addresses. Gmail seems to strip out URLs that are very long. If the server where you installed WP Responder has a long domain name then many of your subscribers will not be able confirm their subscriptions.

This is a huge problem obviously. Rest assured I have fixed in and will be releasing a new version of WP Responder. Very soon. How soon? Read on..

Why So Many Bugs?

I don’t have a good answer to this question :) I started creating this plug-in in mid 2009 to learn how to create wordpress plug-ins. I wasn’t aware of a lot of of the wordpress API features and wasn’t as experienced in programming as I am today. I created this because I needed it for my own website. I was not old enough to get credit cards to pay for an Aweber subscription. It looked as if none of the other plug-in developers understood email marketing as well as I did. (pats sell on the back)

However, sometimes it ALARMS ME to read the code I wrote an year ago! Yes there are many bugs in this plug-in and I AM testing this plug-in in the time that I have available (which is obviously not a lot!) . I need to eat food and keep a roof over my head, go out on dates with my girl (as soon as I get one), and generally..have a life. Which is why I need your help to make this plug-in problem free. You can help by reporting as many bugs as you can as you find them through the bug reporting form within the plug-in ( WordPress Admin –> [Newsletters] –> Dashboard ).

Next Version

The next version of WP Responder will be released……tomorrow!

Version 4.9 will be released tomorrow. This is because I’m seeing a huge number of downloads for this plug-in. There are some really big flaws in the plug-in at the moment that will keep you from reaching all of your subscribers. I really really want to make this plug-in work for my users. I want you all to experience the most success you can with this plug-in. May all of your build insanely huge audiences and then make millions for yourselves and your family. With WP Responder you can finally do it without spending a single penny on an email marketing service.

Download Now!

You can download the latest version of WP Responder email newsletter and follow up autoresponder plug-in at its new website.

The Thesis Theme Sales Pitch Is Misleading

The video that is shown in the home page of the thesis theme is a sales pitch for the theme. In that video the co-creator of the Thesis theme – author of Copyblogger says how other wordpress themes sacrifice clean code in the name of good looks. He says we need valid code in order to rank well in the search engines.

I am a regular reader of Copyblogger. I was a member of his TeachingSells membership website. I have a great deal fo respect for him. But that statement by him disappointed me. Why? Because its wrong and outright misleading.

Brian has a lot of authority and respect among bloggers. It seemed like such a blatant  misuse of his authority. Its almost as if he is reading the script some web designer gave him.

Read the rest of this entry »

You,Inc : The Only Company You Should Work For

No one gets wealthy and powerful by working for someone else. No one.

No one gets wealthy and powerful and free by working for someone else. While working for someone else and doing their bidding you are simply giving your time and effort in exchange for a paycheck. It doesn’t matter how fat that pay check is. You still have to sell your time or efforts to get it.

Financial Independence

As an employee how much you make in a month is fixed often determined by someone else. The power to increase it also lies with someone else. Their opinions about you. This is the kind of circumstances that lead to office politics and favoritism and what not.

When you are self employed you have far more power over your income.

Results-Reward Relationship

While working as an employee, how much you make has nothing to do with how much effort you take. In such a setting you don’t feel easily motivated to do any better than yesterday. Also, if you are a very effective person – doing much more work than you do, a person who is half as productive as you are gets paid the exact same amount of money until an appraisal review. You don’t see any immediate results of your efforts to be more productive.

Brian Tracy, in his book The Art Of Closing The Sale mentioned how once he was once hired to train the sales force in a company in salesmanship. The audience was indifferent to what he had to say – some people dozed off, some read the newspaper and so on. Apparently the sales force was unionized, meaning they get paid whether they close a single sale that year or not. So the sales force didn’t care about what Brian Tracy had to say.

I see this kind of behavior everytime I attend a training session. People who have no investment or understanding of the benefits of a training will not take enough interest in it.

You don’t have to quit your job to start acting like you work for yourself. You can do it this very moment.

What Does It Mean To Work For You, Inc?

Now that you work for you, Inc.

1. Invest in Training And Development – You are in charge of training and development of all employees – you. The general employee mindset is that the employer should invest in training to teach the how to do their job better so that they can get a raise and a better job! Such is the indifference and lack of desire toward bettering one’s own life.There are literally dozens of regions of your life in which you can invest – building negotiation skills, learning the local language, interpersonal communication, critical thinking, self esteem, self confidence and much more.
2. Learn salesmanship – As a self employed professional you must know how to sell yourself and your ideas to a customer. Salesmanship is critical to financial independence. Most people associate salesmanship with being a complete weasel dressed in formals and a tie that rips you off and gets you to buy something you don’t need.
3. Learn marketing – Knowing how to get your product or service to the masses is also an essential to financial independence. It isn’t enough to have product knowledge. It doesn’t matter that you are the best programmer in the world. If all you want to do is create the product and get someone else to market it for you… you are screwed.
4. Value your time – Value every minute of your life. By that I mean, spend every minute of your life to take your sustain yourself and improve your future. Because if you invest and improve your future, the present gets better and better.

   In the average work place, atleast 2 hours is wasted in lunch breaks and coffee breaks every single day. There is often social pressure to have lots of friends. The majority of society views having less friends as a antisocial behavior. Being seen eating alone in a hotel is considered a sad scene. Finding someone to go with and then going there and spending time there and wasting time on converstations there.. you have a clear choice – you can get the complete approval of total strangers who will have no bearing on your financial future or you can save a lot of time and use that time to increase your income.

5. Choose the people you associate with carefully - Again, the kind of people you keep around you – friends, family and associates determine who you are and how far you will go. The people around you can influence your habits, mood, time management, and even health!
6. Manage yourself – Many Don’t let it be that a fear of something bad happening is required to motivate you to stay disciplined in your work and your personal life style. At one time you will literally be You, Inc. There will be people who will work under you. You better be a person who has the qualities that an employee should try to emulate because employees DO emulate qualities from their superiors.

There has never been a better time than now to start acting like you own everything that happens to you. Never a better time to take control of your future.

The Best Productivity Tool In The World

What is the best productivity tool in the world?

The to do list. The to do list combined with discipline to single task.

You don’t really need a smartphone with a really complicated scheduling and alarms system that can wake up you from your deep sleep even if you were dreaming about being Batman in The Dark Knight (In my dreams I am Joker). A simple scribling pad and a

Destroy Procrastination: Break Down Large Tasks

Goals are sometimes scary – especially big ones. The thought of accompishing them makes my leg go still and my whole body stiffen up. But once you break them down to smaller chunks, they become far more manageable. The fear that the big goal induces in your mind often makes you procrastinate on the task. Because of the scale of the task, you estimate that you need a lot of time to finish the task and it needs to be done at one go. For example you may try to write a book on say.. lenses for your photography blog.

Get More Mindspace: Empty Your Mind

You and I…We share a common problem – at any given time, we have 10-20 things running in our head. Ooh.. I have to to put money away in savings account, have to get detergent, must pay web hosting bill, and so on. These sort of thinking just keeps us from reaching our full potential. It ruins the decisions we make in our lives, removes clarity and confidence in your decisions and actions. You can’t sleep well. Generally you are just that much more miserable.

Set time aside -about 10 minutes everyday to meditate. Make it a point to think about nothng. Your subconscious mind will automatically send you the thoughts that have been running in your head. Write each and every task that your mind reminds you to do. Then go out and do it.

Choosing An Email Marketing Platform

An email marketing platform is a software or a service used to create a newsletter. The platform allows you to schedule email broadcasts to your newsletter subscribers, schedule follow up email messages to be sent to a subscriber after a pre determined period of time.

The home for your newsletter. Many consider it to be the foundation of an online business. The choice of service or software to use for email marketing is VERY important because once you start gathering subscribers, moving your newsletter to a new service or software may

1. cost money – you may have to hire a web developer to export the subscribers from the database. This is if your autoresponder software or service doesn’t have a export to CSV file feature.
2. cost time - you have to wait on your web developer to export the subscribers from your web application to a csv file.
3. cost subscribers – third party email marketing service require subscribers to confirm joining your newsletter again if you are importing them with a csv file. They do this to ensure that spammers cannot misuse their service by importing vast databases of email addresses that they don’t have permission to contact. This prevents their servers and ip addresses (which cost money) from getting blacklisted by spam directories. But requiring subscribers to opt-in again will surely cause you to lose some of them.

The choice of email marketing software is like buying a laptop. You do it once and hopefully don’t change for a long long time.

The Email Marketing Platform CheckList

Below are some features that are necessary beyond the very basic functionality of a email newsletter software of taking subscribers and sending broadcasts.

Exporting Subscribers – You don’t want your newsletter held hostage by a software or service. Make sure the platform you choose has the functionality to export your subscribers to a .csv file. The format (CSV) in which the subscribers are exported is important too because other software or services recognize that format.

Autoresponder – When running a newsletter you want to give your subscribers the feel that they are getting personalized attention. This can be done only if you have a follow up autoresonder feature with which you can schedule follow up email to your subscribers.

Custom Fields – As part of finding out which of your efforts are getting the most results, you would to attach some attributes to your subscribers. The attribute may be the website from which the subscriber landed on your website before subscribing to your newsletter. Your email marketing software should let you add single line text box, mulitple choice and hidden custom fields.

Scheduling Broadcasts – The email marketing software should not dictate your working schedule. You don’t want to be awake at 12am to send a broadcast to your subscribers for your product launch. This means the email newsletter software should allow you to schedule the email broadcast to go out at a particular time and go home.

Get HTML code for subscription form – To get as many subscribers as possible you want to put the subscription form on your blog, on a HTML landing page, within a blog post or anywhere. Your platform should allow you to do this. This means the email marketing platfom should have a screen where you can get the HTML code for the subscription form.

Third Party Autoresponders

Below are some autoresponder services that are highly reputed 2 of which I have used in the past.

1. Aweber – This is the most popular email marketing service. The de facto standard for online autoresponder service. Has the more features than any other autoresponder service. I terminated the account because I didn’t need it anymore.
2. GetResponse – Very similar in features and pricing to Aweber.
3. MailChimp - This is a very good email autoresponder service if you are just starting out. It allows you to have upto 500 subscribers for free. In the free account they insert an ad for their service in your outgoing email.

Which one is for you?

If you are short on cash go with MailChimp. Use their autoresponder feature judiciously to make some money, reinvest your earnings to upgrade your account.If you can afford to spend money, go with Aweber. They are very easy to use and have more features, especially the email analytics feature, than any other autoresponder.

Advantage of 3rd Party Email Newsletter Software:

Higher Deliverability: Paid autoresponder services have an agreement with the major ISPs so that emails that are sent by their clients don’t get blacklisted as spam. Emails that are sent using these services don’t land in the Junk mail folder or rejected on receipt.

Actually, the deliverability between a self hosted and a paid autoresponder service is the same. All email that is sent by a self hosted email autoresponder will get delivered, initially. However with self hosted email autoresponders, there is a higher risk of your server getting blacklisted as spam in some spam server directory like spamhaus. When that happens your email deliverability will go down as a lot of subscribers will either not receive your email or will get them in the junk email folder

Cost Can Be Predicted: With third party autoresponders, you will not have unforeseen expenses. The cost of Aweber for a year starting with 2000 subscribers and growing at 100 subscribers a day can be predicted.

Disadvantages of Hosted Email Marketing Tools:

Charge By Subscriber Count – Most autoresponder services charge depending on the number of subscribers in your newsletter. More the subscribers you get, the costlier it becomes. It used to be the case that it costed $19 a month whether you had 1000 or 100,000 subscribers at Aweber. But you can’t get that pricing anymore.

Importing Lists Require Confirmation From Subscribers – Sometimes you may want to import subscribers from another email autoresponder service through a CSV file. When you do this with paid autoresponder services like Aweber, they will send an email to each subscribers in your import file confirming if they want to be in your new newsletter. This is a problem because you will lose some subscribers as a result of this import.

Self Hosted Email Newsletter Software

Self hosted email autoresponders are web applications that you install in your web server.

PHPList – This is a free open source software. It is the oldest and the most widely used one. Unfortunately it is extremely user-unfriendly. It can be difficult to use. The subscription form code cannot be generated and copied to your own web page if you don’t have knowledge of HTML as PHPList provides its own subscription page even which is a bit difficult to customize. You can use it if you are comfortable with editing HTML code.

WP Responder WordPress Plugin – This is the plugin I created for my blog. I needed an alternative to buying an autoresponder service and the available RSS feed to Email services like FeedBurner and FeedBlitz. With this plugin you can create newsletters, create follow up messages for subscribers to receive, provide email subscription to your blog, use blog posts as follow up email, provide subscription to particular categories in your blog.

Which one is for you?

I recommend using WP Responder to build a newsletter because it is much easier to install this plugin – you don’t have to create an additional database. The installation is the same as any other wordpress plugin. You can easily learn to use it even if you don’t know coding. I made WP Responder with Internet Marketers in mind. I took the best features from Aweber and added them to the WordPress dashboard in a way you would expect them to be there. Click here to download WP Responder.