At loooonnnngggg last my unblockable exit hover popup script that is inside Script Smart is W3C compliant.
This means it will work in websites that have this sort of code at the top of every page…
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
Most new websites built over the last 2 years or so, use the W3C to allow their websites to show the same way on all browsers. It makes sense to use it.
Of course the hover popup still works fine on websites that don’t use the W3C to force compliance.
The easiest way to upgrade is to just start Script Smart and it will prompt you to upgrade.
You use the hover popup in the same manner as you did before, it’s just the output script that is W3C compliant.
Thank you to all my users that have been waiting patiently for this update to Script Smart. Believe it or not it took 3 freelance web programmers and me, to get this script 100% compliant.
I’m really proud of it, because it’s the smallest size (~20KB) unblockable hover popup script with exit hover capabilities that is W3C compliant (will run on all browsers and site designs) available on the internet.
There are others on the market of course, but the nearest rival is ~120KB in size as the finished script.
Of course with higher speed internet these days around the world, the overal size of a webpage and how quickly it loads is becoming a mute point.
Aaron
I use PHPBB3 for my niche forums that I own. It’s powerful open source software, and I highly recommend it.
However on certain servers the emails that the PHPBB3 software sends out have incomplete header information. Now in PHPBB3 defense they do specify all the header information in their code, but it’s only on certain server configurations that you need to go one extra step further. Hopefully one day they will add this to their core code.
Here is the problem, the return-path and envelope-from fields are not marked with the forum email address. They are marked with the servers nobody email address.
Return-path: < nobody@server.com >
Envelope-to: user@forumuser.com
Delivery-date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:22:21 +1000
Received: from nobody by server.com with local (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from < nobody@server.com >)
id 1Lq4tB-0000vz-FW
for user@forumuser.com; Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:22:21 +1000
What this means is that any bounce messages will go to the server admin (if they are even looking) and not back to the individual PHPBB3 board administrator for them to take action on it.
Unfortunately a core code hack is required to fix this, and this will need to be re-applied each time PHPBB3 has an upgrade. But it’s only 2 lines of code, so it’s easy.
You want to edit the /includes/functions_messenger.php file…
Find this code (there are 2 instances of this code to change)
ob_start(); $result = $config['email_function_name']($mail_to, mail_encode($this->subject), wordwrap(utf8_wordwrap($this->msg), 997, "\n", true), $headers); $err_msg = ob_get_clean();
and make it this code
ob_start(); $result = $config['email_function_name']($mail_to, mail_encode($this->subject), wordwrap(utf8_wordwrap($this->msg), 997, "\n", true), $headers, "-f" . $config['board_email']); $err_msg = ob_get_clean();
What that does is add in the 5th parameter to the PHP sendmail function which is for specifying the return-path and envelope-from fields.
Now your output will look like this
Return-path: < forumadmin@messageboard.com >
Envelope-to: user@forumuser.com
Delivery-date: Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:33:17 +1000
Received: from nobody by server.com with local (Exim 4.69)
(envelope-from < forumadmin@messageboard.com >)
id 1Lq53l-000177-Nx
for user@forumuser.com; Sat, 04 Apr 2009 22:33:17 +1000
and any bounces or PHPBB3 sent email issues will come back to you personally and not your hosting server admin.
Aaron
More and more, online individuals and businesses need to be aware of the conversation that’s taking place on the interent about them. It’s called online reputation management.
You see it in the media almost every week now, where a business is being badly represented in the web 2.0 sites (like facebook, twitter, etc) and most times they find out about it way to late to take any sort of remedial action about it.
Instead the snowball effect takes hold and what could have been avoided by being proactive about their reputation ends up in a PR disaster across the internet.
Side Note: Here’s a good news story of reputation management in motion.
Now that’s all well and good I hear you say about bigger businesses, but what about us little guys, that aren’t so big.
Does it matter if there is someone bad mouthing our own reputation or our products reputation.?
I say it does matter, a lot, maybe even more so than the big fish businesses. Whatever reputation you have taken the time to build should be protected.
So what’s the solution…
Well, what I used to do, was get a Google Alert setup for all my products and business names, plus my own name. Then go to Twitter search and Youtube search and about a dozen other websites, and do a search for my products again.
These all create RSS feeds, which I then subscribed to using Google Reader. This would make my Google Reader overflow with feeds for the one topic, but the results were impressive. I then used FriendFeed to gather them together into some sort of RSS mash heaven, but even that was a massive pain in the you-know-what.
Cost = Zero $$. Time to setup. A lot. But worth it.
Ed Dale and Lynn Terry from Internet Marketing This Week Podcast fame, actually steered me into getting serious about my online reputation management.
I thought there has got to be an easier way than what I was doing, which would take me hours to setup for a new product to track.
Enter my newest creation. Reputation Smart.
It’s like Google Alerts on steroids. Just enter in your keyword phrase and it spits out a mashed up set of results from about a dozen different Web2.0 sites. Then allows you to get the results as an RSS feed or OPML file.
So what’s the big deal? Massive time saving! No mistakes! And all the results in just one RSS feed that you can subscribe to with your feed reader of choice.
So head over to check it out, and start tracking your online reputation. Oh did I forget to mention that it’s FREE (for now)
Of course if you do find negative remarks about you online…. That’s the topic for another blog post or two.
Now since this project is in BETA I’d like to hear back from you about what you think about my new tool, so leave me a comment on this blog post.
Talk soon.
Aaron
It’s been a couple of weeks since I first launched Backup Smart and the comments back from users has been great.
So great in fact, that I’ve implemented their suggestions and made the software even better.
With more to come in the next release as well that I couldn’t fit into this release.
There is a new update to the software with these changes …
- Site5 control panels are now supported for backups
- Enhanced the SMTP settings
- Several bugs were fixed, including a big one for MAC users
Simply start Backup Smart and under the Help menu, click the Check For Updates menu item.
Or go to the Backup Smart download page and click on the installation badge.
2 important changes to this release other than the new Site5 backup ability.
1) MAC OSX Download Bug Fixed
For those users on MAC OSX there was a bug in where the downloaded files where placed and named. How it escaped testing is beyond me, since it was working at one point.
Anyway if you are using Backup Smart on a MAC, please go to the location where you specified Backup Smart to download the backups to and you will need to manually clean up the files that were incorrectly named. You’ll notice them straight away if you haven’t already, since they have the directory name and the file name all joined together.
2) Scheduled SMTP Settings Changes
In order to provide a more robust emailing feature to send you emails when your scheduled backups are complete with the backup log transactions, the SMTP settings on the settings option in the menus has been enhanced.
Everyone that had entered their SMTP settings will now need to go back to the settings screen and enter in some of the other SMTP fields, like sender name and email address and SMTP port.
Some users were not able to receive emails and most likely it was due to not providing all the SMTP information that servers need.
The help video regarding this feature will be updated shortly to reflect the changes.
Work on the next update release has already started…
- More control panels supported, let me know if you want your hosting providers control panel examined to see if it’s able to be supported.
- Failure proofed large backup file downloads. I’m talking accounts that are over 5GB in total size. You can attempt to download a large backup, you may get lucky, but if your internet connection hiccups then your download will stop.
Talk Soon
Aaron
Do you backup your website(s)? Ever?
I know I didn’t which is the main reason I developed this software. You see I have a lot of websites and look after even more for other people.
Backing up your websites has always had 2 draw backs.
1) You have to remember to do it.
2) You have to have a lot of time to do it since it’s a very manual process.
My new software solves both of those draw backs for those of you lucky enough to have your web hosting on a cPanel web server.
Let me first tell you how to backup your website using cPanel.
a) Go to your http://website.com:2082 and enter in your credentials.
b) Go to the Backup icon (will look different depending on your theme)
c) Click on the link to download the home directory backup (this will take all your files)
d) Click on the links to download your databases
e) Click on the links to download your email filters or email aliases
Now you can do all that or you can set it up in Backup Smart and it will do it all for you on a schedule that you set. Couldn’t be simpler.
Plus it runs on Windows, MAC OSX and even Linux by running under Adobe AIR (which is a new cross platform application environment)
Have a look at this promo video I made for the software.
If you think it’s something that you could use, I have a 7 day free trial for it, and if you read this post prior to 02Feb09 then you can get an early bird special offer of just $7 which is a saving of $30 off the $37 price tag that I’ll be selling this for.
Head over to the website here and get your cPanel Website Backup Software
Aaron
Did you know that Clickbank now offer you the ability to put a product image and a title into your products sales order or checkout page? This came about in April 2008. (Clickbank didn’t find it worthy of letting anyone know, well I didn’t get an email about it and I’m on their list). Clickbank had a big year in 2008 - starting a blog, taking Paypal payments, offering to pay their users via direct debit instead of cheques and many other improvements.
But since I’ve only just realised this great feature about product images was sitting under my nose all this time, I thought I’d share this with you in case you also didn’t know.
What’s the big deal you ask? Well it’s all about presenting yourself in the best possible light to your customers. Clickbank have certainly cleaned up their order page they present on your behalf, but it’s still not your order page so to speak. You need to get as much of your info on that 3rd party order page to make it look less foreign to your buyers. (Same goes for Paypal if you use that).
If you don’t have an image for your product then I urge you to get one made at rentacoder.com or elance.com for around $20-40USD. The credibility it builds for you and ability for affiliates to use your product image in their promotions is worth it alone.
Here is a very interesting statistic and a potential source of income for a freelance graphic person - “Amazingly 27 percent of ClickBank sales pages have NO usable image whatsoever” (source).
Here’s a screenshot of Script Smart’s Clickbank order form before… You can see that I didn’t have a title of the product and it was just the default text. Not very professional at all.
Here’s a screenshot of after I gave the product a title …
I added my product image to my Clickbank account ( you can see how to do that here )
Had to wait 1 day for it to approved, then associated it with the product.
Now here’s my order form with the image in place.
Looks so much more professional and I’m happy again.
Make sure you are making good use of this excellent feature of Clickbank.
Leave me a comment below as to your thoughts on this. Do you even use a product image to help promote your product.? I believe it’s mandatory for all products digital and physical.
Aaron
Script Smart has just been updated to version 3.03
This is mostly a bug fix, but there is a major difference under the hood with this version.
Adobe AIR uses a security feature to make sure that you are installing the software that you think you are and not software that’s been compromised by another party.
So in order to get this added security software developers need to digitally sign their software to build trust and confidence with their end users.
Initially I didn’t bother with this, and installation screens used to look like this…
From a professional business point of view, that just plain screamed I’m a cheap and dodgey developer.
So since Script Smart 3 now uses Adobe AIR, digitally code signing an application is easy. Not cheap, but easy.
I am producing all my software in future in Adobe AIR (so far 3 products) and as such decided getting a secure digital identity for my parent company Web Smart Central as a very solid investment.
So the installation screen now looks like this…
What does all this mean for you the end user. To new users it’s just normal business, to existing users, well that’s where it get’s tricky.
The new application that is signed as coming from Web Smart Central is treated a new software install from the licensing database perspective and as such Script Smart will ask you to enter your email address that you signed up with.
I’ve tried to avoid this, but alas the licensing database is now in such a mess that most of the existing users will need their serial numbers reset before they will be allowed to use Script Smart after updating.
There’s no point in putting this off, since future updates (which are coming soon) will trigger this anyway.
If you have yet to upgrade to v3.03 of Script Smart, then follow these steps…
Step 1. Go to the Script Smart download page (put in a support ticket if you can’t remember the download page location)
Step 2. Click on the Install Now badge or do a manual installation
Step 3. Enter your email address that you signed up with and you should be right to go.
NOTE: Do not try to run Script Smart first and let it do the upgrade, this will lock you out and you’ll need to contact me to get your serial number fixed.
I whole heartedly appologise for this, but I have to make the software better for you in the future and this needs to be done.
If you get locked out of Script Smart during this process, please submit a support ticket, or email me and I’ll promptly fix your serial number.
Talk soon
Aaron
Are you trying to get FAQ-Tastic v1.07 to work on Wordpress 2.7, what a drama.!
Here is the solution.
Step 1. Download the most recent version of FAQ-Tastic Lite v1.07
Signup on the form at the bottom of this page to get the download (credit were credit is due - at least support them with your email address)
Step 2. Download my FAQ-Tastic v1.07 Wordpress 2.7 Patch file.
Step 3. Upload all the original FAQ-Tastic Lite files to your Wordpress plugins directory.
Step 4. Before you activate the FAQ-Tastic plugin, make sure to upload all the patch files straight into the the faq-tastic plugin sub directory overwriting the original files that you just uploaded.
Step 5. Go to your Plugins area in the admin of Wordpress and you should see a plugin with v1.07 Patched for WP2.7 that you can activate.
(Why didn’t I just include the whole FAQ-Tastic Lite ZIP - because that’s for the developer to do not me. I’ve just made your life easier by supplying you with the patch. Make sure to download the original FAQ-Tastic Lite v1.07 from the site I listed above)
Thanks go to Copernicus who explained the problem. I just implemented it and thought I’d share. Enjoy.
Drop me a comment if you found it helpful.
Aaron
Finally I have restructured my websites relating to internet marketing and have decided to reuse one of my old domains websmartcentral.com as the central hub in my wheel of websites. I used to use that domain for my Australian Web Hosting company, but switched over to netrospect.com.au in late 2007.
My Business Web Hosting company is growing every year, and is as close to an offline business as I’d ever like to own and operate. It’s specifically for local Australian businesses only.
Content that previously was posted to my personal website aarondwyer.com about internet marketing will now be posted here.
I have some big plans for this website, which include talking about internet marketing tools (not just the ones that I create), general internet marketing information from the trenches, and both audio and video interviews.
I’ll also be adding resources that I use for my internet marketing to the resources section of this website.
Talk soon
Aaron
