SpamStopsHere.com Stats

September 29, 2004

A while back I added SpamStopsHere.com to my list of recommend services/solutions. Of course, it’s still the only entry in that category, but that’s mainly because I can’t ever remember to recommend a product.

For this post, I just wanted to show you some of the stats that I am seeing right now with regard to email:

Month Spam Valid Total
Feb 2004 18,594 432 19,026
Mar 2004 20,564 996 21,560
Apr 2004 22,428 520 22,948
May 2004 23,377 618 23,995
Jun 2004 28,360 497 28,857
Jul 2004 47,191 456 47,647
Aug 2004 68,489 597 69,086
Sep 2004 76,417 681 77,098

% of Spam calculation does not include the counts from non-existant mailbox, virus, and tarpit filtering.

It’s hard to believe that the amount of spam directed at my personal domain has gone up 400% since the beginning of this year. 77K spam emails for the first 28 days of September comes out to 2,700 spam emails a day coming this way. The best part? I see maybe one every couple of days. Thanks again, SpamStopsHere!

Popularity: 3% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | 1 Comment 

GMail is dead! Long live SBC Yahoo! DSL!

September 29, 2004

After all the problems that I have had with GMail, I’ve finally decided to ditch it. I got tired of sending messages, waiting, getting a “Could not send message” error and then looking in my Sent folder and seeing a copy of the message. Did it send or not?

I don’t know why I hadn’t explored this option in the past but I’ve had SBC DSL since it came to our area several years ago. A couple of years ago, SBC teamed up with Yahoo! for SBC Yahoo! DSL service. As part of the combined service, you get access some of Yahoo!’s premium services.

In this case, the part I like most is their premium email service. Thanks in part to GMail, Yahoo! bumped up their storage to 2GB, twice that of GMail. In addition, I can create 10 sub-accounts, each with a 100MB limit. Perfect for other members of the family. Also, one huge feature that I love once I found it is that I can use Yahoo! Mail to fully manage my personal email address. Sure, other email apps allow you to change the Reply To address to whatever you want, but Yahoo! Mail now allows me to associate my personal email address to my account and then send email from that account. It is now like a much more robust version of www.Mail2Web.com. Not to mention all of the Contact and Calendar integration!

So, I’ve got some GMail invites to give away if you are interested.

Popularity: 5% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General, Google | 3 Comments 

Hiatus

September 29, 2004

It’s been about three weeks since I have worked on my DynamicImage project. Part of it was getting just a little too sucked into the details of unit/assembly testing. I was actually spending about 4 times more working on the test cases as opposed to the actual functionality. This is a good thing as far as end results go, but not too good for making progress.

The main reason for the hiatus is that this site, SwoofWare, was really put together during a hiatus from my other side gig. A friend/coworker/partner and I have spent a lot of time in the past talking about how we could make some money. We’ve finally settled on the concept and actually spent a fair portion of the summer trying to make it into a client app with .Net WinForms. It seemed like every two weeks or so, we were back at ground zero having to start over and figure out how to get past another hurdle. So in early August, with lots of back to school activities and volatility, I took a break so that I could get away from that project which was getting pretty depressing. A week or so ago, we decided to get back into it and are opting to go the ASP.Net route for our initial release. So, I’ve been pretty busy trying to get that ramped up. Right now, I’m pretty pumped about our progress and outlook.

Of course, I need to do something because I am rapidly moving up in the Google search results for DynamicImage and soon people will be coming here and admiring my VaporWare!

Popularity: 4% [?]

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More GMail Issues

September 22, 2004

Right now, GMail is returning a server error. I can’t even get to the main screen. This was right after I spent 30 minutes composing an email and then having it not send initially. I really like GMail and some of it’s features, but I really need to look at something else I think. These glitches are getting really annoying.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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GMail Issues

September 16, 2004

I really want GMail to be everything to me in regards to email that Google is to in regards to searching. However, I’m struggling with my faith. GMail is the solution that I have wanted for a long time to be able to access my email history from anywhere at anytime. Previously, I downloaded all of my mail with Outlook on my laptop at home. If I was traveling, then I used Mail2Web. Mail2Web is great for quick access to the messages that haven’t been downloaded and deleted off the server. However, when I needed access to a message that I had already downloaded, I was out of luck.

With 1GB of email storage, GMail was supposed to solve all my problems in regards to accessing my email. Unfortunately, I’ve had many other problems pop up over the past several months.

- Two months or so ago, I had an issue where emails sent to my account just weren’t getting through. This went on for several days before, finally, I got a batch of emails all at one time. It included all of the test emails I had sent several days prior as well as all of the emails other people had sent to me. Granted I have my primary email account forwarded to my GMail account, but even emailing directly to my GMail account didn’t work.

- There are the times when GMail has been unavailable.

- How about those friendly JavaScript pop-ups that something didn’t work and to try again?

- Or when you type a really long reply to someone, click ‘Send’ and the little message appears in the top-right that it is sending the message. But then just hangs there. Did it send the message or not?

- I like how it builds my contact list for me from people I email, but because it only contains name and email, I still need to maintain my real contact list with all the addresses and phone numbers.

- Right now, I am trying to reply to a message but keep getting the JavaScript pop-up that it can’t. I’ve tried in different logged out and even tried in different browsers with no luck.

At this rate, I’m tempted to move over to Yahoo email. Since I am a SBC DSL customer, I have a Yahoo account that has 2GB of storage. However I’ve been reluctant to move to it because I am sure that it is dependent on me being a SBC DSL customer which I may not be for the rest of my life.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General, Google | 1 Comment 

Assembly testing DynamicImage

September 9, 2004

I’ve really enjoyed the freedom that working with NUnit during the development of my DynamicImage component has given. Granted, I’ve only got one method so far (Resize()) but that method has close to 150 test cases against it. The code for the method is maybe 60-80 lines, but the code for the unit tests for that method are in the neighborhood of 700-800 lines. The time spent on coding the Resize method is probably about a quarter of the time that I’ve spent getting the unit tests coded. Slow, but well worth it. There is no other way to quickly and accurately run that many tests manually. Several times I put what I thought was quick and easy code into place only to have it bomb on some of the different image orientations.

Testing the actual class that does the image manipulation is one thing. Testing the combination of http handler to image manipulator is another. I mentioned in an earlier post about how I’ve had the functionality for DynamicImage (but called it ImageHandler) coded for a year or two but for this project I am reworking the code to work better, be more flexible, do more, etc. One of the obstacles that I ran into on the original project was with unit testing. The problem was that all of my code for image manipulation was in my handler’s ProcessRequest() method. It was quick and convenient to put it there at the time. The problem with unit testing was that ProcessRequest() requires a HttpContext object. I spent a fair amount of time trying to create a valid HttpContext object in code and researching mock objects (which are farther along now than last summer) but was unsuccessful. Part of my goal for DynamicImage was to break the different pieces apart and architect it to where I code do proper testing.

So now that unit testing is working for the image processor, I need to be able to test the handler. But I can’t really “unit” test it since I run into the same problem with the Context object. At my day job, I have experimented with NUnitASP and it works great for testing ASPX pages. I thought that I might be able to modify the image tester control to stream the images to create an Image object which I could check Width and Height properties. However, that’s more of a “product” test scenario and I was having some trouble ’seeing’ how it would actually work. Back to the drawing board.

After a little more thought and research, I have come up with the following solution to “assembly” test the image handler. I still use NUnit (not NUnitASP) and make calls directly to my handler (DynamicImage.ashx) passing in the property values on the querystring. In my test class, have a method to load an Image from a stream that is obtained by accessing a url. I will then be able to compare the expected size with the actual size of the image returned from the handler. Not technically unit testing, but more of testing how two assemblies work together. Back it works. Of course, all of this works find for just resizing an image and checking the dimensions but won’t really help out to much farther down the road when I add features like caching and watermarking.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under DynamicImage, Projects | Leave a Comment 

Blogging as a marketing tool

September 8, 2004

Interesting article on how one online t-shirt vendor uses their blog to help get traffic which resulted in readers which results in buyers.

RESULTS: Site sales tripled during 2003, and have continued strong in 2004. Altogether, blog content helps to bring in about 35% of total site sales — 10% from the email newsletter, 20% from affiliates who often reuse the content, and 5% from Blog traffic itself.

Blog readers are among the traffic most likely to convert to buyers. “Six to eight percent of Blog readers buy something. Once someone finds a Blog entry and reads the whole thing, they are about as qualified as you can get.”

Ultimately I hope that I will be able to use this site as an effective blog and marketing tool.

Popularity: 6% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General, Google | Leave a Comment 

Building a better mousetrap

September 7, 2004

My first project that I plan to release, DynamicImage, isn’t groundbreaking or revolutionary. There are plenty of other components out there that do the same thing. However, I’m using this project, which is relatively small, to fine-tune my development processes and habits. I believe that incorporating as many of these tools as possible ultimately leads to a better development experience as well as a better product. You can find out more about the tools by following the links or by Googling on “test driven development” or “continuous integration”.

I wish I could say that I am using them all and that they are deeply embedded in my processes. Unfortunately, that is not true. But I am making progress. I am using NUnit to test my DynamicImage control as I develop.

It’s working out better than I expected. I’ve got about 50 tests in a abstract test class which is implemented by landscape, portrait and square image test classes. So with one click I can run 150 test cases on the control. So far this is just for the Resize method. It’s been great being able to make a change and validate that nothing broke so quickly. The logic in resize isn’t that complicated but a couple of tweaks I am adding might work with one image type but not another and NUnit quickly works through all of that for me.

I’m hoping that I will be able to use NUnitASP to test the HttpHandler portion the control. After that is probably NDoc. Once I get those done, then I will be ready to release my first version.

Popularity: 4% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under DynamicImage, Projects | 1 Comment 

Favicons as link bullets

September 1, 2004

I was updating my list of Links that displays in the sidebar and saw that WordPress allows you to associate an image with the link. Associating images to entries is a bit of a novelty to me and not something that I wanted to do if I had to go out and find appropriate images and manipulate them accordingly. Then I thought about the favicon.ico images that so many people are using on their sites. Sure it is an .ico file, but just maybe it will work.

Of course, my most visited site (and most updated), Gadgetopia, doesn’t have a favicon. So I decided to work with another site. I added WordPress to my Links list and pointed the Image URI property to the favicon. And voila, it worked. Kind of.

I wasn’t too thrilled with the default display of Link images. WordPress shows the image with a 2px border (since it is linked) and did not display the Name of the link. A couple of quick modifications to links.php and I was set:

Change lines 210-211 from:

if (strstr($row->link_image, 'http'))
echo "<img src='$row->link_image' $alt $title />";

to:

if (strstr($row->link_image, 'http')) {
echo "<img style='border:0px;padding-right:4px;vertical-align:middle;' src='$row->link_image' $alt $title />";
echo($name);
}

and you end up with a nice looking list of links. Kind of.

You didn’t think that I could get away without browser issues did you? With the exception of Dive Into Mark, which shows as text, all of the icons display fine in the latest version of Firefox (actually Kintana Superkangaroo with the Firesomething extension). And in the latest Internet Explorer, A List Apart, Dive Into Mark, SimpleBits and Zeldman had issues. Not the same issues though. A List Apart shows as a 32×32 black and white image. Dive Into Mark and SimpleBits have broken image placeholders. Zeldman is a 16×16 black square.

I plan on keeping this feature as it looks good in Firefox (my primary browser). So for those I mentioned above, feel free to fix your icons so my site looks better. ;-)

Popularity: 8% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General, WordPress | 2 Comments 

Yahoo RSS module

September 1, 2004

I still use Yahoo as my browser home page. It provides the best solution for me of bringing a bunch of often referenced information together: links, news, movies, tools, entertainment, etc. Of course, it is also lightweight and very clean. One new feature that I discovered recently is their Yahoo RSS module that you can add to your portal pages.

Because My Yahoo! now supports the RSS format, you don’t actually “use” RSS to benefit from it. My Yahoo! uses RSS to pull headlines and summaries from your favorite web sites and blogs. All you have to do is specify which sites you’d like to see added to your personal My Yahoo! page — we’ll take it from there.

I use this as my weblog aggregator. I’ve tried using some third-party applications, but didn’t really enjoy the experience. Too much activity and distractions. Until I found this module, part of my morning, late-morning, after-lunch, mid-afternoon, end-of-day, after-dinner, and before-bedtime routine was to go to all the blog sites I enjoy and look for new content. A little bit tedious. Now, I can see on my homepage if there is anything new to read. I may have to bump it above my News module.

What made it really nice was that there was no screwing around with pointing to the RSS xml link or anything. Just add the URL and Yahoo took care of the rest.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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Posted by Matt Smith | Filed Under General | Leave a Comment 

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