Jun/090
Some Re-Decorating
Quick update. I’ve just bought my WordPress Blog out of the dark ages and upgraded to 2.8 ! I also took the opportunity to migrate the database over to a server here in the US from the UK, something I should have done along time ago !
I’ve also thrown a new skin on to freshen things up but I’ll be re-decorating over the next few months so excuse the mess : )
Jun/090
A Moment of Nerdness…
In a moment of complete nerdness and partial boredom I decided to read the list of Predefined Constants in the PHP Manual. To some this would be considered up there with reading the Oxford English Dictionary, but I’m always one for cramming my head with useless trivia and was attracted by crazy sounding things like ‘CRYPT_BLOWFISH’.
During the process I did discover something pretty valuable. I don’t know about you all, but I’m tired of writing “\n”; everytime I want a new line at the end of an echo(); call. Enter my new friend ‘PHP_EOL’. PHP (E)nd (O)f (L)ine. Nice ! Not only that but it deals with X-OS issues with newline calls, was it “\n”; or “\n\n”; I’m I on Unix, Windows or Mac ? No worries. ‘PHP_EOL’ !
May/090
ESP, DKIM and a bunch more new acroynms
A colleague mentioned ESP’s the other day, sounding more like she was having a physic moment she was in fact talking about Email Service Providers. Turns out on the the world of the inter-web that everything has to have a cool sounding acroynm and Email Service Providers is yet another example.
It is now deemed no longer cool to manage your own bulk emailing applications, rather, to pay an ESP a monthly fee to do it for you. In return they promise better deliverabililty and ROI.
This pontification all came about after a webinar professing the wonders of video in email. Sponsored and presented in part by Goodmail Systems, one of the fore-runners in video email. Naturally they are going to promote the idea, that’s a large portion of their income stream, but the concept has huge potential. Syndicated video content to a mass audience. This year the buzz term for me is syndicated content. Content distributed through a huge network by content providers to a massive (pre-approved) audience. It’s only natural that this should extend to email.
My only concern is that Email Standards have barely left the ground. Web browsers and internet standards, courtesy in part to the W3C, have seen a slow shift to convergence on a common set of goals and standards which even Microsoft are slowly adhering too !
However email is light-years behind. No one email client is the same, a major pain in the rear when trying to create those funky looking mail shots. Not only that but mail protocols are in need of an update. Spam and unsolicited mail are so prevelant these days that it seems a little late that only now are we seeing procedures and protocols being established to deal with a common nuisance of the 21st century.
DKIM is definately a step in the right direction. Patented by Yahoo! this is an early shot at dealing with such nuisances. Blacklists and whitelists, the good and bad of domains, currently provide a database of information to bulk/spam mail filtering software that’s frequently updated. Hopefully DKIM and MTA (Mail Transfer Agents) will add to this arsenal and provide the majority of us a long awaited shield from the rubbish floating around on the web.
Video in email ? We’ll wait and see, but I think it will be big. Currently only supported by a limited number of email clients of which Yahoo! and AOL (owned by Yahoo! and remember they invented DKIM in the first place) are the two major ones, video in email will only be available to a limited email client base. One to watch.