I have been loving Shaun Inman’s script so much that I was getting really miserly about how I was using the precious first 35 short URLs that have only one character (disappointingly symbols and capitalized characters aren’t used. I think that’s a function of base_convert). In fact, to make sure I’m using them wisely I just “reserved” the last 12 single character URLs for manual use, or maybe installing Lessn again under something like rle.me/x/ as the tutorial suggests, instead of in the root!

One great way to make sure you’re getting the most out of Lessn is to make sure you don’t shorten a URL more than once! It could happen so easily as I discovered. You get talking about a site or project, and you want to share the brilliantly shortened link. But what was that Lessn URL again? Then you waste time searching back… was it H? G? 5? It would be too tempting to shorten it again.

To solve this minor issue I wrote a page to be added to Lessn called listr.php. Listr basically digs into the database to list all the original URLs and the shortened URL.

Installation

This couldn’t be easier to add to your Lessn install. Simply download the listr.zip file, uncompress it and FTP it to http://yourdomain.com/-/ Once you login and go to http://yourdomain.com/-/listr.php you will see all of the URLs you’ve shortened over time. Download Listr.zip

Note, this Listr page isn’t private, and anyone who browses to it will be able to see your list. I figure that’s fine, as anyone who can see your Short URL can guess the other short URLs. To make your Listr private include the “index.php” (which has session sniffing cookie action) and scrap the then redundant includes like config.php and db.php. You can then also remove the defines on LESSN_URL and LESSN_DOMAIN.

The results are listed in a table which you can customize. For instance you might not want your ID column, and you might want the short URL to be a link (I commented this out).

Note, I’m not a “PHP Poet” so maybe some of the server calls and code could be made more elegant. Maybe pagination or search will become an issue once you’ve had Lessn installed for a while. If you make some improvements please let me know, I’d love to share it here.

Warning One: Why?!

This isn’t the kind of marketing that should be done “because you can” in my opinion. As someone who gets a lot of email I admit that getting a newsletter or any email with embedded images usually has me scrambling for the Unsubscribe link. In 2009 there are many effective ways of engaging your audience online without emailing. Before we begin ask yourself; “is an HTML email the most effective way to communicate to these people?”

Warning Two: Spam?

Once you have your message together, who will you send it to? Where are you getting your mailing list? Have these users opted-in on your site (like this), or have you simply collected the addresses independently?

If your registration form didn’t indicate there would be mailouts, or (and I have seen this happen) if the mailing list is from another site or campaign entirely, you are working against your privacy policy! This is essentially spamming, which no sane person will respond favourably to. You may be doing the brand or campaign a disservice in this case .

Making the HTML Email

Assuming this is a valid way of communicating to your brilliant mailing list, you can start building your HTML page.

Consider the End User

The first thing I do is look at the mailing list. What domains do the emails belong to? You’ll have many mail clients; ISPs (like Sympatico, Cogeco, Bruce Telecom etc.), online services (like Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail etc.) and custom URLs (personal domains, company emails).  The reason to look at these is to figure out how your email will be rendered. ISPs and custom URLs are wild cards!

They might be downloaded into programs on the readers computer (like Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.) or maybe from some online webmail that you won’t have access to test, or maybe to some handheld device.

Online services like Gmail, Yahoo and Hotmail can easily be tested before launch; but often render things in a painfully different way.

Your message may be viewed on any platform on any device. Email standards are less predictable than web standards. If the medium is the message here, there could be trouble!

Consider the Message

Since the mail clients will render your messages differently you have to assume that someone isn’t going to be seeing the images. Maybe they’ll have the option to turn them on, but will they? Your message has to be able to stand on its own – as text with supporting links to a webpage.

Building the Message

The end platforms are too varied for me to make absolute statements, but the following guidelines should help you make the most of this. Here are some steps I follow.

1. Go Easy on the CSS: Unlike browsers mail clients that are standalone programs don’t necessarily obey web standards that we take for granted in web browsers today. If the program listens to CSS it may only be in a rudimentary way. If you use CSS for colouring text I would also back it up with old-school <font> tags! Likewise I think it should be fairly obvious to avoid Javascript / dynamic server calls. You want to keep this mail as low-fi and simple as possible.
2. Go Old-school: Since CSS is out the window you’ll need to build your layout in Tables. This may increase the size of your HTML – which you don’t want to be too big, especially if you have dial up users. Downloading a huge email isn’t as optional as choosing whether or not you’ll visit a page. Also, avoid Flash and PNGs. Be completely 90′s in your thinking and you should be safer.
3. Follow Accessibility Rules: This is a good rule to follow anytime; but having ALT and Title tags for images is critical when they’re not loading!
4. Use Absolute Links: Since this HTML page will be literally pulled into a different space, using linked files and images with relative paths (eg. /images/dog.jpg) would be a bust. You have to use the full absolute path (http://domain.com/images/dog.jpg)
5. Testing, Testing, Testing: If you don’t have accounts with all of the popular webmail services, sign up and send tests out. You want to see this in as many mail clients as possible. My experience is that you’ll never get this message to look 100% unless you can get the reader on to the HTML site! You will need to find compromise.

Sending the HTML Email

There are several ways to sending your message out. If you can afford the extra expense I hear great things about Campaign Monitor. While I haven’t used it, it boasts some powerful tools which would be especially helpful in tracking the success of your campaign.

If you’re doing this on the cheap, then you only need FTP and Internet Explorer.

First, upload the HTML message and all related images and linked scripts. Then, view the page in Internet Explorer (We are using IE as it has a very easy Emailing feature we’ll be using. To my knowledge this tool isn’t included in any other browser I have installed on my PC. If you know of any alternatives (especially if you’re on a Mac!) please let me know!).

I have made a demo mail out here.

From the IE menu: File > Send > Page as Email. This will open your page in your default Mail Client (I don’t think this will work with online services. In this example I’m using Windows Mail (formerly Outlook Express)).

Tip: I recommend doing your mass-mailouts with a mail client other than your primary account. You will get a lot of replies for unsubscribes, Out of Office replies and Mailer Demon failure warnings. Setup a generic account that speaks to the campaign like “offers@domain.com” etc.

Now, change the title, and the message is ready to send. This is hugely important: put your mailing list in the BCC (Blind Carbon Copy). Letting those emails been seen or harvested by anyone is insanely bad netiquette and it can lead to the brand getting a ton of bad press!

If you are potentially doing more mailouts in the future you should setup Mailing Lists in your mail client. Your ISP may limit how many people you can mail at one time. This is a Spam precaution. Remember to test!

The linked HTML Email works perfectly in Gmail, Yahoo, Apple Mail and Windows Mail. In Hotmail you have to verify that you want to see the images.  These five were all that I tested for the purpose of this article.

As you can see in my image of Hotmail, if my HTML Email had more live type than images the message would have still been clear. All that is legible is my live text footer and link (not shown).

As I wrote about last week, I think it’s much more effective to personally reach out to your audience with a call to action that is a link to a webpage. You can’t put a value on the personal touch, plus it gets around all the ugly usability / viewing issues that users will invariably come across.

Recently I was asked about managing an Emailing list, and the best ways of distributing newsletters to your group. I think the answer that was expected would be either sharing about some mailing service (like this one, but there are many others that also Google well) or to give a step by step on free distribution methods (Update: I have written a post called Easy DIY HTML Emails).

What I want to share is a smarter and much more impacting way – and I don’t think it’s what the average client wants to hear:

Email your newsletter one at a time.

I know it sounds ludicrous, but think about it. You get an email from your friend; “Hey guys, check out these photos of my weekend camping” complete with a link to a Flickr set. This email has dozens of names in the To field. What do you do? In my own personal experience I’ll check out the link 7 times out of 10. I’ll reply maybe 2 times in 10. Whether you do it consciously or not, your numbers are probably about the same or less.

I have sometimes been that friend sending the mass email. You rarely get a reply if at all. I think it’s human nature. When you see so many names in the email-to field, you expect someone else will reply, and go about your day. The call-to-action is impersonal, and as the reader you feel required to do nothing.

On the flip side, when you take the time to personally write a friend an email, and ask them about something specific in their life, and engage them in the way that you normally do, that link will always be checked out, and you will almost always get a reply.

This isn’t anything new – this is how human relationships and interactions work. Yell at a bunch of people that you have a newspaper for sale, and the people that care will come and get one. Personally go up to someone, and engage them, and you have their full attention.

This obviously won’t work when you have thousands of people you’re mailing. If you’re keeping mailing lists, I suggest you keep a list of the no-effort addresses (people that have taken the time to sign up like those who did here), as well as a list of the people who you need to make a stronger appeal to. At the very least, keep a list of the VIP’s. Often in business it’s the 5% that do 80% of your revenue. Treat them like gold. The purpose of a newsletter is to keep people up to date. Sometimes that’s a two way street.

Easy isn’t always better. Sometimes you have to really commit to make results.

So your site is built – now what? The truth is building the site is the easy part. Now you have to work on it. Don’t dismay! This is the fun and engaging part.

1. Serve

To get readers, you have to have something for them to read. Creating new content consistently and predictably will encourage return visitors. The Internet is very much about finding the “latest thing”. This means you may want plan to have a new post every week, or twice a month. Find a schedule that works for you – and keep it up. Tools like WordPress etc. can publish automatically on set dates. Just keep the content coming.

Don’t let users come across your site and find a stagnating blog section – it’s better not to have one at all. At the same time, your content has to be relevant and impactful. Watering down your posts may sink you.

2. Be Found

Search Engine Optimization tips are only the first step in getting traffic to your site. Having your video redundantly on a video serving site like YouTube, or making relevant tweets may win you new readers who are doing searches outside of the traditional search engine. Social Networking is a perfect way to make yourself known to communities in the spaces they’re most comfortable in.

Simply stated; think of Social Media sites as tools, not miracles. They can be skillfully used to target your core audience.

3. Get Entrenched

Arguably getting involved in the conversation is more  important than creating content. Podcaster / Internet Consultant / Social Media guru Gary Vaynerchuk stresses the importance of getting active in the other spaces on the web where your audience goes. “Which social media tools should I use? All of them. Your user base, and the people that care about you – you need to connect with them anyway you can, everywhere you can, and as often as you can. That is essential.”

Going to every blog, forum and site in the realm of your niche and making comments, and asking questions will show your passion and commitment. Establishing yourself everywhere leaves a nice bread crumb trail of links back to your site, and hopefully earns you return traffic.

In summary

It’s important to have the right mindset about your website and how it is supposed to work for you. Once your website is built, the work is only beginning. Maintaining a healthy site with an active community is a full time job.

Hustle!

I highly recommend you check out some of the Gary Vaynerchuk videos on the subject of building your brand / website.

• PHCC: a vlog post on the principles of running your project
• Gary Vaynerchuk podcasts on the subject of the internet and brand building
• Wine Library TV Gary’s podcast (that sees 80,000 viewers daily)

In early 2004 I started a database of my Top5 high rotation songs of the week. This was a very simple database table with eight fields. It’s been very rewarding to see this progress kept, so naturally I want to bring it into the new site. On the former version of the site ASP calls the database, and repeats each row of data in a table. I could just copy and paste the HTML tables after they’ve been rendered, but where’s the fun in that? I’d prefer to have each table fall into my blog on the appropriate date for the last five years.

click to enlarge

WordPress naturally doesn’t import .mdb files natively, so I knew there would be some wrestling with data! Under Tools > Import WordPress has several proprietary formats it can import, as well as the ubiquitous RSS feed. I decided to convert my database into RSS.

At first I thought it might be a simple matter of exporting the XML (which RSS is a form of), but this was going to require some ugly code work to fit the RSS 2.0 format. In the end, I modified the old recordset page to render the RSS for me!

The old recordset page would call to the database, then populate a table with the songs like so:

This was done with code like:

<tr>
<td width=”13%”>one.</td>
<td width=”87%”><%=(t5.Fields.Item(“songone”).Value)%></td>
</tr>

So it’s just a simple matter of changing up the body content! Obviously I don’t want to do my site layout in Tables again, opting for CSS styling on a list.

As already stated, ASP gathers the records in a Repeat Region. RSS likes content repeated with the <item> tag. So in the end my new ASP record code looked like:

<item>
<title>Top5 Tracks for the week of <%=(t5.Fields.Item(“date”).Value)%></title>
<pubDate><%=(t5.Fields.Item(“date”).Value)%></pubdate>
<category>Top5</category>
<content:encoded><ol>
<li><%=(t5.Fields.Item(“songone”).Value)%></li>
<li><%=(t5.Fields.Item(“songtwo”).Value)%></li>
<li><%=(t5.Fields.Item(“songthree”).Value)%></li>
<li><%=(t5.Fields.Item(“songfour”).Value)%></li>
<li><%=(t5.Fields.Item(“songfive”).Value)%></li>
<%  IF TextShow <>”" THEN%>
<li>Guilty Pleasure: <%=(t5.Fields.Item(“guilty_pleasure”).Value)%>
</li><%ELSE%><%End If%></ol></content:encoded>
</item>

Now when this renders I can view the source and I’ll have all of my data nicely listed within <Item> Tags! (Note: the entire <content:encoded>tag must be on one line, it wouldn’t fit very nicely here). I went into the rendered HTML, removed the head and footer HTML leaving just the Items.

Next I created an XML file to be my importable RSS. I added the header and footer to the file:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>
<channel>
<title>Top5 High Rotation Tracks </title>
<link>http://arleym.com/</link>
<description>High rotation tracks of the week</description>
items will paste here…
</channel>
</rss>

Then it was a simple matter of pasting in the rows of <Item> after the RSS description, and uploading into WordPress.

The only snag I hit was when all of the dates were coming off as December 31, 1969. I quickly realized that the Date column in my database was actually a text field with entries in the format of “08.0-5.09″ (mm.dd.yy), which looked cool, but meant nothing to the database. A simple find and replace on the period and editing the field to be short-date resolved this issue nicely.

You can download my RSS Rendering page and my RSS headers here: RSS_Maker.asp & RSS.xml

When you have a site that multiple designers, developers or contributors might be working on you run the risk of stepping on one another’s toes, losing data, and at its worse; breaking something on your website. This can happen very easily. Take the following image as a very basic example. Let’s say you have a yellow page with an A on it. Person 1 decides the page should be blue, Person 2 decides the letter should be B. Both changes are done at once. Who ever uploads last has their change live on the site.

For both changes to take place they would have to be done one after the other, not simultaneously.

The Solution

To help prevent these kinds of problems Dreamweaver’s FTP protocol can manage a Check in/Check out process. There are several reasons why this is a great tool:

• When Person 1 grabs the file, they grab it from the Remote location (the server) as opposed to a local version. This means that he’s working off the most recent version in case someone has made changes they don’t know about.
• When you access a file Dreamweaver gives you the option to download all related files (images etc.). This is perfect for when you are overhauling the whole page entirely.
• When Person 1 checks out the file Dreamweaver “locks” it preventing Person 2 from making changes. Instead, they will see that the file is in use by Person 1. (note, if they forget to check the file back in and you absolutely must have it, I connect by an FTP app like FileZilla and remove the .LCK file for that respective file (eg. index.asp.LCK)).

The Setup

It’s pretty easy to setup too!

1) Set Up Your Site: Even though you do not need local copies of the site, you do need to setup a Site within Dreamweaver. Then when you check out files it downloads them to the site directory. Create a directory on your computer for the site, then in Dreamweaver’s menu: Site > New Site.

Go to the Advanced tab. Give the site a name, and select the Local Root folder to the directory you just made. You can skip all the other form fields.

2) Setup the FTP Connection: From the Site Definition window’s left pane click Remote Info and select FTP. Enter your host/ip, username and password.

Keep “Maintain synchronization information” checked, and check “Check out files when opening”. Now enter your name and email address that everyone else with server access will see.

3 Test the Setup Once it has finished caching / checking the connection go to your site window (F8 is the keyshort to toggle it). You will need to click the Connect button (circled here)

Once you do this the left pane should show you the remote server, and the right pane the local directory.

Using the FTP

Double click one of the page files. Usually I say no to dependent files (unless I know I’ll need them). Now that file should appear in the Local pane. When I double click it opens and a green check mark appears next to it in my Files window. This means it is currently checked out. If you haven’t downloaded the dependent files the page will look VERY different as the images and CSS that style the page are gone.

Make your changes, and save the file. Now click the file and click the Check In button to put it back on the server. This not only updates the page, but relinquishes your checking-it out, making it available to other people.

You’ve now successfully set up Dreamweaver FTP. This will hopefully keep everything a lot safer. It’s still no replacement for frequent back ups, but it’s one more layer of security to help you sleep at night!

There is a lot of documentation on improving your sites SEO; and it is often broken down into a few key practices:

1. Site accessibility
2. Site Content using keywords
3. Absence of black-hat tactics
4. Relevant links

(You can read about these in detail from many sources, this Boag World article is quite succinct).

It seems a great majority of articles I read, and podcasts I hear on the subject focus on the Accessibility, Content, and Best-practices aspects of SEO, and little is said about the links. 

The very thought of “link backs” for me conjures up a notion of some bake-sale trading game, or worse an expensive ad campaign. I have found personally (as opposed to company SEO) that getting relevant links can be a lot easier and less dreadful. 

In short I think the answer is simple: Enjoy the internet. 

The internet has been like a second home to me for the last fifteen years. I’ve been checking out sites and communities and signing up where I thought some involvement / experimenting / playing were warranted. I almost always have used some variation of usernames like arleymcblain or ArleyM. Sites requiring a username often give you the option to link back to your site, and I happily take that offer every time. 

As a result of these years of exploring the web I rank quite well in Google by my name or username arleym. Admittedly, the uniqueness of my name and choice of username have played a great role in this as well.

These accounts and profiles showing up in search engines could be a curse as well as a blessing – this info may become your first impression.

The internet can be a fun place, so I encourage you to enjoy it and get involved (responsibly of course ;). Sign up, read, watch,  make comments, subscribe, rate, and explore.