More Email Delivery Tips
Recently one of my websites sent me an email that showed up in my Spam folder. I viewed the headers to see the SpamAssassin flags and was a little shocked. Two things were a complete surprise. First, I...
View ArticleIncrease Conversion Rate on Freemium Upgrade Page
Fido Finder was my first Internet site and continues to be one of the most well-known sites I own. The site is built on the freemium business model. Give away the basic product and allow customers to...
View ArticleHandling Bounced Emails in PHP
I’ve touched on this subject before, but I’m going to go more in-depth as I recently learned that I wasn’t fully handling bounced emails. The problem I run into is that there is no manual for properly...
View ArticlePHP Email Sending Guide
I have run into a lot of issues over the years getting my website-generated emails delivered to inboxes. Unfairly marked as SPAM, accidentally blocked by ISP’s, and occasionally lost in space. This...
View ArticleFacebook API: use publish_actions instead of publish_stream
Don’t use publish_stream, use publish_actions! I was doing some research for Fido Finder’s Neighborhood Watch feature and I came upon the actual documentation for the different Facebook Graph API...
View ArticleWebsites Behind a Wall
The biggest website implementation mistake I see is still the Wall. People are just convinced that their offering is so enticing that people are going to be compelled to register just to find out if...
View ArticleYou’re Too Skinny
This is what your website looks like on a modern computer when you don’t redesign it for more than 10 years. Relax…Stretch Tirerack’s website fits within an 800px width. It is awkwardly jammed into the...
View ArticleHow To Pass Your IRS Audit
Recently my single-member LLC was audited by the IRS. I met all the known triggers in the filling year in question, the most obvious being that I filed an amendment after noticing a major mistake in my...
View ArticleHow to Choose a Business Name
Choosing a business name can be difficult. I speak with people all the time who are having trouble coming up with a name for their new venture. Here are a few ways you can come up with a business name....
View ArticleCrowdsourced Website Marketing
The Problem For about two years now I’ve had a vision for a way to crowdsource website startup marketing. You start an incredible new web service and you ask for the crowd to help launch it. Wahooly...
View ArticleDomain Name Availability / WHOIS API
On Naming Force we need the ability to check the availability of a suggested domain names. Previously we had used the eNom API to do this but received many complaints that the data was inaccurate....
View ArticlePHP date_diff days negative zero issue
I ran into an odd problem today that I couldn’t find a solution to when searching Google. I ended up figuring it out and thought I should document it here for future searches. PHP has a date_diff...
View ArticlePHP Email Bounce Script
A lot of people have asked for this. This is the email bounce script I use. You will have to pipe all emails to this file.
View ArticlePHP Conditional Forced HTML Cache
I had a need on Fido Finder to cache a PHP page only when it loads without any querystring parameters. The Lost Dogs page, in it’s default mode, loads the first page of ALL of the active lost dog...
View ArticleHTML Charts Without Flash (using HTML5)
Previously I had used Open Flash Charts to create line charts on some of my sites. I was interested in finding a solution that didn’t require Flash to draw charts. None of my iOS users can see the...
View ArticleMy NBA Rank Predictions for 2013-2014
West Spurs Clippers Warriors Rockets Thunder Trail Blazers Grizzlies Pelicans Lakers Timberwolves Nuggets Mavericks Kings Jazz Suns East Heat Pacers Nets Knicks Pistons Bulls Wizards Raptors Bucks...
View ArticlePHP PDO Intermittent “Can’t connect to MySQL server”
Ran into this problem when converting a site to use PHP PDO, and have no idea why this works. If your connection string includes the local server’s IP address, server name, or the website domain name...
View ArticlePHP API Framework
I just finished writing my first webservice API. I did some research into some frameworks to help with the creation. After trying a few I ended up going with the Slim framework and am pretty happy with...
View ArticlejQuery Countdown Timer
I spent way too many hours trying to find a customizable jQuery countdown timer. Almost all of the timers I found could only be one size and couldn’t be scaled down. They are all designed to be some...
View ArticlejQuery Ajax History URL Plug-in
I’m working on a change to Fido Finder that will turn the search results filtering into an Ajax query instead of posting a full page. No big deal. But, since the interface allows a user to narrow/alter...
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