Ever since we launched YumDrop, we’ve been trying to find a way to not only get more eyeballs, but to increase conversions. Our site is really slick and from what we can tell, very usable. But the conversions still aren’t there. We’ve known for a while that the issue is marketing, or a lack thereof. Because of that, I decided to do some quick research tonight (yeah, never stop working…go figure) and found some really good articles. Hopefully you find them as insightful (and in other was reaffirming things already working well) as I did.

• Minding the Gap Between Click and Conversion
• 17 New Rules for Successful E-Commerce Websites
• The SEO Benefits of Blogs
• Market Your Online Startup for Next to Nothing
• The eCommerce Conversion Funnel, Part One

Another blog I found while searching for e-commerce conversion rate was by Rick Whittington. The first post of his I read was here. But when reading through the latest posts of his from the last few months, I found a bunch of other useful stuff, including some of the links above.

Recently, Kyle, knowing that I’m an anal bastard when it comes to my MacBook, turned me on to a nifty product from SpeckProducts for my beloved 17″ MacBook Pro. It’s called the SeeThru Hard Shell Case. He had just purchased one and said it was great, so I went to their site and ordered one. Its a great little product (although its a little pricey), that easily snaps on to your MacBook Pro and protects it from scratches, spills, etc. There are cut outs for all of the ports and the SuperDrive slot. I was able to install it in less than a minute and now my MacBook is fully protected, which should help it retain a little more of its resell value if and when I decide to sell it and upgrade to a new MacBook.

Shame on me for not having gone to the site in a couple of weeks due to lack of time. I went to go read up on what Jeff had cooking lately only to find a 404 where I thought I’d find some insightful info. I did some digging around, and only found his other blog over at Veritgo Software but it hasn’t been updated since the start of the year. Does anyone know where Coding Horror has gone?

Update
Looks like its back. Maybe it didn’t go away and the internet was being its flaky self.

For those that don’t read somedirection very often, here’s an insightful post. I just want everyone to have the opportunity to read this great article (and not just because I get a mention there).

I’ve been trying to contribute (when I have time) to the ASP.NET Forums lately. I’ve noticed that a lot of people who are new to ASP.NET don’t seem to know to use the Visual Studio debugger. When you see funky things going on in your code or behavior that you can’t explain, jump into the debugger. It’s saved me major headaches before. That and its good to walk through your code line by line for testing purposes. It makes you analyze each line if cide to make sure its doing what you expect it to do. So, moral of the story, don’t be afraid of your debugger, it’s your friend!

As I’ve written about previously, I’m working on a Radiant site with my buddy KB. We want to leverage a newsletter building application and an email sending service that we’ve developed for our other projects in this site. To do so, we needed to consume some web services that are part of another Rails application to do the subscribing and unsubscribing from a mailing list. There doesn’t seem to be much information about consuming web services from a Radiant application, so I thought I’d share what I found here. My discovery was based on a suggestion by Sean Cribbs to look at the Radiant LDAP extension.

So basically I found that you need to create a global tags module. In it you define your ActionWebService API and the tags you’ll use. Here’s a sample:


require 'action_web_service'

   tag ‘mytest:action’ do |tag|
      if request.post?
         # some code to get posted values
         myval = request.paremters['mytestvalue']
         if myval.empty?
            raise “No value.”
         end
         mytest = ActionWebService::Client::Soap.new(MyTestApi, “http://someapiurl/”, :handler_name => “some_handler”
         mytest.some_method(myval)
      end
   end
end


So that’s it in a nutshell. Wrap your tags and an Api class in the same module. You can call your Api methods from your tag definitions to execute the services you need.

We recently switched to using an in house application for sending our campaign newsletters for one of our websites. It turned out that the new SMTP servers we were using weren’t trusted by email services such as Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc. as being valid sources of email messages. In come SPF, the Sender Policy Framework which these services use to determine if mail is coming from trusted domains for the sender. So, we had our hosting provider jack in some TXT DNS records for us that would allow our new SMTP servers to be trusted by SPF.

I figured all would be well and good. Email through these servers wouldn’t end up in a Gmail account’s spam folder. Not so. Apparently Gmail cache’s these records for a certain period of time, which I’m unaware of the length of. A nice post from Chris Linfoot gave me a little more insight into what might be going on. He mentioned in a my reply to his post that Google may indeed have not refreshed the cached record to my TXT SPF answer. Beyond that, Gmail may even consider my messages spam even if the messages pass SPF. Apparently Google doesn’t really use SPF messages to determine what really is spam and what isn’t. Interesting. My guess is they use it somehow in trying to figure out what is spam and what isn’t, but they don’t use it as the general rule of thumb for what should be spam. Its just one of their metrics.

Recently, on my Windows machine at work, I’ve noticed Gmail being super slow. I hadn’t noticed this on my MacBook using Firefox or Safari. I had found a post here about this very issue and another one here about speeding Firefox up, but there were no real solutions. I’m wondering if Gmail has changed something recently or if there’s an issue with Firefox? I know I’m very tempted to just use my MacBook now for email since its not such a slug. If anyone has ideas behind this or even solutions, I know I’d like to here about them!

Kyle emailed me about this earlier today. I’m not sure I like this and I hope that Yahoo declines, though I have no solid reason for not liking it. To me, it just seems wrong and not a good business choice for Yahoo. What will Microsoft bring to the Yahoo brand that Yahoo either hasn’t done already or can’t do on their own. I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts on this.

It seems these days, even with Apple’s personal computer marketshare below 10%, Microsoft is playing catch up. They weren’t first to market with portable music players and Vista is supposedly based on the success of OS X. Regardless, I think there are plenty of things MS could learn from Apple, and #1 on my list is the way Windows updates itself opposed to OS X. A huge annoyance is how you basically have to run Windows Update until you get all of the updates. They have updates to their updates. OS X on the other hand, will roll them all into one and once you’re done, you’re really done. Microsoft, stop making me update your updates time and time again. Make things simple!