eCommerce Tools and Custom Programming Solutions
I'm a technologist at heart, assisting companies best utilize the Internet to market themselves and sell their products and services online. This includes organizations as large as Google and as small as one or two individuals.
At Over The Top and Exhibit A Communications, I've programmed solutions for Google as well as at least one other company that was later acquired by Google.
I've been CTO of an Internet SaaS company and spent my time pretty evenly between guiding the future technical strategy of the company, architecting software solutions for my dev teams, designing and running a data center to service our clients world-wide as well as being a technical evangalist/sales engineer to our media clients large and small.
I've also been Chief Photographer of the Daily Sun/Post newspaper back when it was a 5-day a week daily newspaper.
I also spent a great many years as a beach lifeguard for the City of San Clemente as well as Jr. Lifeguard instructor and then as it's program coordinator.
Bragging rights
Private Pilot with Instrument rating and proud husband of soon to be 25 years (and counting).
Hopefully this will be one in a series of quick hit information bites about Google Apps.
Did you know that –
with Google Apps Standard, you are limited to 500 email sends per day as opposed to 2000 emails a day with the Premier Accounts?
This is yet another compelling reason for hard-core power users to step up to the plate and upgrade to the Premier edition.
Google announced recently that the Standard version of Google Apps is now limited to a maximum of 50 users. If you were a previous customer with more than 50 accounts on the Standard version, you will be allowed to keep your users in excess of this number but future implementations will be limited.
Frankly, I don?t see this as a deterrent to the use of Apps. Anyone with more than 50 users should be either in a position to pay for the service or, if they were a non-profit organization they can apply for a free version of the Premium edition of Google Apps.
From Google Apps help:
Standard Edition User Accounts
Effective 14 January 2009
For new organizations using Standard Edition:
Standard Edition users get a custom email address, tools for word processing, spreadsheets and presentations, a shared calendaring system and access to a flexible intranet system. Organizations using Standard Edition get up to fifty free, ad-supported user accounts. If your organization requires more than fifty user accounts, Google recommends using Premier Edition.For organizations already using Standard Edition:
If your organization currently uses Standard Edition, you may continue using Standard Edition free of charge with your existing user account allowance free of charge. If you need to add additional user accounts over your current user account allowance, you’ll need to upgrade your entire domain to Premier Edition.
Any thoughts or comments? Please use the comments form below to bring up your points.
I received an email from an EMM customer today asking about how best to advise HIS client when it came time to talk about the value of Enhanced Mail Manager for ASPDotNetStorefront versus hosted services like Constant Contact. Aside from the obvious cost discussion (a HUGE factor for many small businesses) here is the rest of what we discussed via email:
Thanks Jonathan for your continued support of EMM.
Has your client done side by side testing of open counts with their mailing list in Constant Contact and in EMM? Seems to me this would be the best possible comparison. It would give them a solid foundation for a discussion about where they are getting the most bang for the buck.
I’ve done everything in software that I can to minimize the likelihood of filtering based on common information (ie : it is better to NOT encode graphics as attachments, always have a text and HTML version done as multi-part, include proper CAN-SPAM support, etc).
However, there is much about filtration that cannot be addressed in software and must be addressed by either a service bureau (like CC) or by the organization doing the mailing. The following items will all contribute to mail getting through:
- Ensuring that the IP address of the sending mail server is not on any real-time blacklists or shared by any spammers if in a shared hosting environment. IF your website is hosted in an environment that has strikes against it for clients who spam, you would want to use the mail settings in ASPDNSF to ensure that your mail is going out through that mail server rather than through the web server’s SMTP server. This is one of the services I?ve used in the past to check up on this: http://www.mxtoolbox.com/blacklists.aspx
- Ensure that your mail server can be matched forwards and reverse DNS to eliminate "No Reverse DNS Pointers Found" type of bounces.
- Setting up proper SPF and SenderID DNS records for the sending email domain. SenderID and SPF are becoming more and more critical for acceptance of email at ISPs and corporate email hosts. You can learn more about it here: http://www.openspf.org/SPF_vs_Sender_ID
- Keep your mailing list clean. This means immediately remove not only manual unsubscribe requests, but probably more important is to process bounce backs immediately.
- While EMM will accept one-click unsubscribe requests (as required by CAN-SPAM requirements) it doesn’t automate processing of bounce backs or manual unsubscribes. We do, however make it easy by accepting a list of email addresses to unsubscribe as well as attributing the type of unsubscribe to a specific mailing for reporting purposes.
- By running a "dirty" list, you will find that your emails are much more likely to get bounced since ISPs have been known to "shut the door" temporarily or permanently to mail servers who consistently attempt mail delivery to large numbers of old or invalid mailboxes. This helps protect not only against dictionary spam attacks but also against old data lists.
- Consider subscribing to reputation system/service. While I’m not certain if these actually work or not, there are a number of people who swear by their effectiveness. An example of this is GoodMail: http://www.goodmailsystems.com/. Nothing against the quality of their service, I?d have to have a pretty darn good reason to subscribe to a service like this as I feel that just contributing to a system that could tier email deliverability based on how much money you want to spend is just plain wrong.
Some of these items are set once and forget it kind of things while others will require a little bit of work on the part of merchant to keep their reputation clean. That is why it is always good to immediately monitor the results of each mailing (true for in-house or outsourced). You can spot trends in your bounce backs as well as in your open rates using EMM’s reporting features.
I hope you find this information helpful. If I can help in any other way, please feel free to shout!
MJG
I?ve received a few inquiries about the features that are available in BE.Net in our comments section. Here is the latest grid posted (showing 1.4 although they are now up to 1.4.5):
Feature table
This is a list of all the features of BlogEngine.NET
Current Version
1.4License
Ms-RLCost
Free and open sourceServer Requirements
ASP.NET 2.0 or MonoMono support
YesLocalization
Yes, support for 31 languagesMultilingual
NoMultiply authors
YesStatic pages
Yes. You can create pages not part of the blog chronologyNavigation
Theme based and a sitemap provider for static pagesAlternate front page
Yes. All pages can be the front page of the blogEach author have own feed
yesNew comment notification
Yes. Either by RSS, ATOM or e-mailData Storage
Provider based. XML or SQL Server, MySQL, VistaDB and many morePost rating
Yes. Visitors can rate the individual postsGravatar support
Yes as well as MonsterID, Identicons and WavatarsTag cloud
YesPost calendar
Yes. AJAX enabledSearch posts
Yes. Maybe the best blog search availableSearch comments
Yes. The search can include the comments as well as postsUser control injection
Yes. Any user control (.ascx) can be added to a blog postContact form
YesComment moderation
Yes. Can be turned on/off in the adminDisable comments
Yes. You can even disable comments after a given interval of timeE-mail attachments
Yes. The contact form can send attachmentsPost ordering
Descending by dateCategories
MultipleSubcategories
YesTags
YesPost Editor
TinyMCE but others can be usedDraft Mode
YesAuto save
YesMicroformats
xFolk, Rel-Tag, VoteLinks, XFN, XOXO, rel-home, rel-directory, rel-enclosureOther export formats
FOAF, SIOC and APMLOpenSearch support
YesGoogle sitemap
YesHTTP compression
Yes (optional)Live comment preview
YesPost API Support
MetaWeblog (supports newMediaObject methodPost Moderation
NoSyndication feeds
RSS 2.0 and ATOM 1.0Feedburner support
YesOPML support
YesWindows Live Writer
Yes, extended support for both posts and pagesPing services
Yes. Pings various services and more can easily be addedComments
YesComment Spam
Invisible CAPTCHA and AJAXComment syndication
Yes, as either RSS or ATOMAJAX enabled comments
YesThemes
Yes (master pages and ascx files)User Security
Users and roles can be defined freelyTrackback
Yes, both send and receivePingback
Yes, both send and receiveRSS Aggregator
The dynamic blogroll aggregates feedsForum
NoGallery
NoPlugins/Extension
Full extension modelMobile device support
Yes, special theme for mobile devices
Referrer Logs
YesImport/Export
BlogML and RSS
Search Engine Friendly URLs
YesCross-post
NoSpell checker
Yes (ieSpell)XFN support in editor
YesPassword Protected Posts
NoBlog By Email
Not yetAPI
MetaWeblog, javascript API and full SOAP web service APITracking scripts
You can change your tracking script from the admin. Works on all themesHTML header tags
You can add your own from the adminFile extension
.aspx by default, but can be changed in the web.configDevelopment principles
KISS and no third-party assemblies. Very small and clean architectureCode syntax highlighting
Yes. C#, Java, VB.NET, HTML, Javascript and T-SQLUser Community
CodePlexDocumentation
http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/wikiSample Sites
http://blog.madskristensen.dk/
If anyone has other questions about implementation or ??? Please, speak up in the comments below and we?ll do the best we can to answer your questions about this great blogging platform.
Ok, I?ll have to admit that I?m drawn to this site since my first paying gigs in photography was a forensic photographer to local attorneys documenting construction defects. That being said, this is a fun little site that combines evidentiary job listings along with mini-tutorials. Started only in November of last year, the Crime Scene Photography blog has great potential if they can keep it up.
I find it interest too that it appears they are just up the road from me. Their first posting is about a photo class starting at Golden West College just up the road from me. Hmmm?. Wonder if I can squeeze a little time out of my schedule this spring to attend? I also like their (admittedly short right now) link list of interest to those who document crime scenes photographically.
Have you ever fancied yourself entering the world of crime scene photography? Perhaps this is a great place to start!
Yes, I crow the advantages of using Google Apps in small to medium sized-businesses and that MOST people can effectively replace Outlook and just use the fantastic tools available with Google Apps to accomplish this and still be effective in their jobs. However, I still haven?t cut that cord myself. There were a number of compelling reasons why not and Google, thanks to the boffins at Google Labs, have knocked down one more barrier for me, and perhaps for you as well.
I?ve always relied very heavily on the Tasks feature in Outlook to help keep me on track and ensure I don?t miss any important deadlines. Most of these are initiated by emails and are just a quick CTRL-SHIFT K away. Now, the Gmail team has added Tasks as an option that you can turn on via Google Labs in Gmail interface (the normal as well as the Google Apps version). Not familiar with Labs? It should show up as a tab in your Settings page of Gmail. Or, you can use the quick link icon at the top of any Gmail page: 
Once in the Labs tab of Gmail Settings, you turn on Tasks by clicking Enable in the following section:
They also offer you some tips on accessing and using your tasks:
Once you?ve created a task, you?ll see your Task list floating on the page along with your inbox. You?ll see that you can mark a task completed, you can pop out the task list into a new window, there is a quick link to the Related Email as well. Y
ou?ll find an Actions menu that allows you to prioritize your tasks by moving them up and down, indent them (or not) to create hierarchies, Edit the details of the task as well as hide and show what you?ve accomplished. Clicking on the plus sign will add a new task; the trash can will delete the selected task as you?d imagine. Lastly, under the list icon at the lower left of the task pane, you?ll find another menu that allows you to Refresh, Rename or Delete the current list as well as to create a new list. Once you have multiple lists, you?d use this menu to switch between them.
The only item that is missing (and hopefully will get added soon) is the ability to add a deadline and have an alarm go off (email or otherwise) when a deadline or time before a deadline is reached. They are just soooo close.
In case you were wondering, what is the number one thing that is keeping me from completely dumping Outlook at this stage? Well, I?m managing to many simultaneous mailboxes throughout the day to have to log in and out of each one (or to keep different browsers open for each identity) so until I either simplify my life or I come up with a better solution, I may be stuck with Outlook.
Any thoughts, suggestions, complaints? Please use the comments form below to tell me what you think!
In case you hadn?t seen it yet, Google is now hosting the Life magazine photo archive. You can search on the cutlines of images, the locations of the photographs, the subject of the photo and best of all to those doing photographic research, the photographer?s name!
The archive boasts photos taken from the 1850s to today. Interestingly, Googles blurb about the archive states that you can
which might be a bit difficult since photography is generally accepted as starting in the 1820s. I think perhaps they meant their archive dates to the 1850s to today.
Here are some searches that I recently that turned up images by many of my photographic heroes:
I?ve just recently completed work on a New Product RSS feed for one of my ASPDNSF customers and thought I?d post it here for all to benefit from. This package uses the already existing RssFeed.aspx files that come with ASPDNSF for display. To use the attached XMLPackage, you?ll need to do the following:
Here are some of the more interesting things about the XMLPackage that might going through the code a good learning experience. The first is identifying the odd format that RSS feeds expect dates to be in. Below is the SQL code to format the date string (in this case for the item creation date (to be used as the published date)
<query name="Items" rowElementName="Item"> <sql> <![CDATA[ select top @Limit ProductID, ProductGUID, Name, SEName, Description, LEFT(DATENAME(dw, CreatedOn), 3) + ',' + ' ' + RIGHT('0'+CAST(DATEPART(DAY, CreatedOn) AS CHAR(2)),2) + ' ' + LEFT(DATENAME(m, CreatedOn),3) + ' ' + CAST(YEAR(CreatedOn) AS CHAR(4)) + ' ' + CONVERT(varchar,CreatedOn,108) + ' PST' AS CreatedDate from dbo.product with (nolock) where Deleted = 0 and Published=1 order by createdon desc ]]> </sql> <querystringreplace replaceTag="@Limit" replacetype="request" replaceparamname="limit" defvalue="5" validationpattern="^\d{1,10}$" /> </query>
This formats the dates into a string that looks like the following:
Wed, 8 Oct 2008 15:40:02 PST
as opposed to a standard SQL date that look like this:
2008-11-28 14:34:05.920
I just found it much easier to manipulate this in SQL than in XSL.
One key to properly providing an RSS feed for consumption is to provide the last build date so that RSS readers aren?t needlessly downloading articles. This is provided by determining the most recently created item and stuffing it into the LastCreatedDate. The RSS Channel includes Generator, Title, Link, Description, Copyright, Date, lastBuildDate, and image elements; all except the image elements are drawn from AppConfig or System values to minimize the need to modify this file unless you need to. This XMLPackage also includes the following elements of the RSS Item specification: title, link, description, author, guid, date, pubDate and image. In the case of Item, all the values are drawn from the product database including properly formatting the product link URL and the item image URL.
I?m looking forward to hearing how people are going to use this application. Please use the feedback section below to let me know what you think of this XMLPackage!
New Product RSS Feed v1.0 download
ASPDotNetStoreFront released their latest version last week. I?ve just recently finished a transition to the new version on one of my client sites (http://www.tobacco-barn.com) in conjunction with a design change. We?ve all been impressed with overall how easy the transition was. This particular site has a great deal of customization of various files in the system and with the addition of the ?In Store Pickup? option, we can now remove that customization from our list of code changes on every update.
We are also impressed by how quickly and effectively the Tabbed Interface for Products works and have even extended it to add a new tab if a product has a link to a video defined in the product?s ExtensionData field, a video tab will be added to the interface. The ?Customers Who Bought X also Bought Y? is another nice little freebie thta comes with this latest version. We also integrated the Viewing History feature and hope that this will help drive sales on this site.
Another nice feature is the redesigned admin UI. I?ll be the first to point out that I don?t like graphic updates just for the sake of doing so but the layout of menu options is just so much more compelling and thought out than previously.
We haven?t yet implemented and tested the full-text search capability but for those who have a lot pertinent information in product descriptions, this may just prove to be a god-send.
Here is their press release about the new launch:
AspDotNetStorefront ML v8.0 Release Raises the Shopping Cart Bar Gives Merchants the Tools to Tackle a Tough Economy
In the latest ML v8.0 release significant enhancements have been introduced in the platform to increase conversion rates, maximize performance, and reduce administrative overhead to put merchants in the best possible position to maximize profits and grow their online e-commerce sales in a slowing global economy.
Westlake, OH (PRWEB) November 12, 2008 — AspDotNetStorefront is proud to announce the latest release of its flagship AspDotNetStorefront ML e-commerce shopping cart platform. In the latest ML v8.0 release significant enhancements have been introduced in the platform to increase conversion rates, maximize performance, and reduce administrative overhead to put merchants in the best possible position to maximize profits and grow their online e-commerce sales in a slowing global economy.
AspDotNetStorefront ML 8.0 includes powerful, high performance, full-text product searching, helping shoppers find what they are looking for faster and keeping them anchored to your site. Additionally, AspDotNetStorefront will intelligently build related products as shoppers browse your site and display them on your product pages, allowing merchants to effortlessly increase upsell percentages and capitalize on cross-marketing opportunities. New inventory control features add flexibility to how out of stock products are handled on your site to reduce shopper frustration, and a reorganized and redesigned admin site makes performing common tasks more intuitive. Tabbed product pages make it efficient and attractive to organize complex product data, and "customers who bought x also bought y" capabilities are now included out of the box.
customers who bought x also bought y
"We’ve gone to great lengths to focus our development efforts on providing tools that allow merchants to make the most out of every sale opportunity," AspDotNetStorefront COO & Executive Vice President Dan Van Kuren remarked. "With more consumers indicating they’ll be shopping online this busy holiday season even in uncertain economic times, merchants need to take advantage of technologies that set them above their competition. Version 8.0 puts advanced capabilities within reach of ecommerce veterans and fledgling online businesses alike while maintaining exceptional ease of use and minimizing administrative overhead. Take our renowned SEO capabilities and add to that our constantly expanding feature set, and you have an ecommerce platform that can take you across the finish line in first place. This latest release demonstrates our commitment to helping our online merchants grow, regardless of what is happening in the market."
AspDotNetStorefront ML Version 8.0 contains many new exciting e-commerce features, including the following:
- Exciting new merchant control panel, featuring a new layout, and expanded use of Wizards to assist merchants in configuring their store features, settings, and capabilities
- Tabbed product page presents all product details without the need for scrolling the browser screen
- Dramatically Improved (Full Text) Search Performance, to identify root words, plurals, compound phrases, and search term reordering
- Automatic display of Product Suggestions, based on previous customer purchases, This provides an Amazon.com like capability guiding customers to additional products of interest for purchase
- Improved display of Product Stock Conditions, allowing merchants greater flexibility in indicating real-time inventory status
- Support for credit card processing by Sage Payment Systems
- Improved "Page Not Found" (404 handling) display, offering e-commerce driven search suggestions based on missing page attributes guiding consumers to the best fit pages and products.
- Automatic display of a customers’ viewing history, allowing them to quickly locate and view recently viewed products
- Automatic display of Related Products, based on heuristics of product-view data
- Improved handling of "Delayed Capture" payment methods, to allow merchants to void non-completed orders
- Improved compliance with XHTML display standards, including the ability to specify the exact "alt" text of a product image, for improved website accessibility for people with special needs and SEO indexing
- 400% faster page loads than v7.0 version
Additionally, AspDotNetStorefront will be updating its online demo sites to better showcase our new technologies. Prospective customers will enjoy a greatly expanded product database to demonstrate the nearly unlimited capabilities of the AspDotNetStorefront shopping cart platform; developers and web designers can modify skin templates to see for themselves how easily professional e-commerce sites can be developed using the AspDotNetStorefront platform.
AspDotNetStorefront ML Version 8.0 is available for $1,295, with no monthly fees or annual commitments required. C# and VB.NET source code available. SQL Server 2005 or higher required, along with the asp.net 3.5 SP1 platform. For more information, visit the AspDotNetStorefront website at http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com.
About AspDotNetStorefront:
AspDotNetStorefront.com, a division of Discovery Productions, Inc., is a privately held company that provides online eCommerce shopping cart platforms for nearly 10,000 merchants and 6,000 developer partners. For more information, visit http://www.aspdotnetstorefront.com or call 602-490- 0243.###
If you currently use ASPDNSF or have questions about it, please use the Comments below let us know what you think and/or rate this posting for usefulness.
Google announced recently that Google Apps has passed a SAS 70 Type II audit! The audit was performed by an independent public accounting firm to verify the technical processes and controls utilized by Google to ensure that customer information stays safe.
According to Wikipedia:
With the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX), SAS 70 took on increased importance. SOX adopted the COSO model of controls, which is the same model that SAS 70 audits have used since inception. SOX heightened the focus placed on understanding the controls over financial reporting and identified a Type II SAS 70 report as the only acceptable method for a third party to assure a service organization's controls.
So, if you?ve been waiting to pull the trigger on converting your company?s Email and/or Groupware over to Google Apps for security reasons, you can now rest easy on this point. This coupled with their announcement that Premier Editions will include 99.9% uptime Service Level Agreement (SLA) for GMail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Sites and Google Talk.
If you are looking to get your business converted over to Google Apps, talk to the experts here at Exhibit A as we can help streamline this process for you.
