Summersault Weblog

The IMail Server from Ipswitch software is a business-oriented e-mail management system that runs on the Windows operating system. A few years ago, we were hired by a local Internet Service Provider, Parallax Systems, to help migrate their IMail Server system to a new mail server using qmail and vpopmail on a Unix-based operating system, one of the most popular mail management system setups on the Internet.

As a part of that process, we created a Perl script to assist with the migration of all the virtual domain data, individual user mailboxes and preferences, forwards, aliases, address book files, etc. It uses the Windows registry key maintained by the IMail software and creates equivalent configuration settings under the qmail/vpopmail setup.
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Today’s local paper has a story about a software glitch at the Meijer big-box grocery stores that caused them to ring up all store purchases at half price. From the article:
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As a software engineer, one of the genres of programs that you’re always on the lookout for is the “killer app,” the tool or utility that immediately becomes the “best in class” for a given problem space and technology. One problem space where I’ve been hoping for just such a tool to come along is answering that age old question, “how can we quickly schedule a meeting between a bunch of people with separately maintained and very busy calendars?” In the past, it meant lots of back and forth conversations, disjointed calendar checking, and that sense that you were spending time on “administrivia” when you could be out enjoying the world.

Enter the free web tool Doodle.ch.
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Writer and prolific blogger Dave Pollard has a post up about when not to use e-mail, in response to people asking him how to reduce inappropriate use of e-mail in their organizations. I don’t agree with all of his rules (for example, I think it’s fine to send a group of people a link to a document/policy/site update instead of waiting for them to be notified via RSS or regular browsing), but find Dave’s points useful to consider.

What do you think?

Kelly Jackson Higgins has written a great article on Seven Ways to be Mistaken for a Spammer, first noticed from a Slashdot post. Kelly’s advice and observations are very much in line with our experiences as a company that hosts e-mail accounts and tries to fight the ever-rising surge of spam, and as developers who are often creating software that sends legitimate e-mail to users all over the Internet. The main don’ts from the article:

1. Ignoring “unsubscribe” requests.
2. List “repurposing.”
3. Providing unclear privacy checkbox instructions, and ignoring users’ responses.
4. Losing track of internal desktop and server machines that can be used against you.
5. Not keeping databases and address lists up to date.
6. Having vulnerable mailer forms on your Website.
7. Working with non-reputable third-party mailers.

Whether you take Kelly’s word for it or ours or someone else’s, these items are SO important to pay attention to.

When you redevelop a website’s content structure (which often happens when you redevelop it’s graphical appearance), it’s pretty common for directories and files to get renamed, chunks of content to get moved around, and in general, for the site to become quickly unfamiliar to those who had learned their way around it.

If your site is fairly small, this isn’t a big problem - someone can just start from the beginning and get where they’re going fairly easily. But if your site has lots of content, it can be very jarring to have to go find all of that content again. What’s even more noteworthy is that if there are lots of people linking to your site or if you’ve achieved a certain standing in search engine results, rearranging all of your content structure can have a negative impact on how people find and use your site.

So, here are six tips for any time when you make significant changes to the content structure of a non-trivially sized website:
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Today, the Palladium-Item published Indiana Attorney General Steve Carter’s recently released “safe online shopping tips.” I thought I would comment and expand on these tips, especially as they relate to Summersault’s experiences with online commerce.
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Congratulations to Charlie Peck and his student group from Earlham College, who just had their LittleFe project featured in the UK information technology journal, the Register: Educators boost US tech fortunes with cheap cluster. There are some good quotes from Charlie, who has served as a colleague and mentor to several Summersault staff:

“There’s something very visceral about it,” said Charlie Peck, a professor at Earlham College and one of the project’s leads, in an interview here at the Supercomputing conference. “If I can make learning this stuff accessible and interesting enough, then the students may be willing to put down their Gameboys.”

Little-Fe is a complete 4 to 8 node Beowulf style portable computational cluster used for teaching key concepts in parallel computing such as speedup, efficiency, and load balancing.

Mark hasn’t had time to create a weblog entry about this yet, so I thought I would note that he recently had an article published on Perl.com entitled Rapid Website Development with CGI::Application, which is all about the popular and mature Perl CGI::Application framework for web applications. It’s definitely for geeky web developers like us, but shows how we’re keeping track of the latest trends and tools for efficiently creating robust web applications for our clients (and designing the logo for some of those tools too). Nice job, Mark!

When people use the CC field for a long list of e-mail recipients of which I’m one, I usually send them back something like this note:

Hi. This is a boilerplate message that I send to people who send e-mail messages to me as a part of a CC to a large group of people. I would like to discourage you from using this particular approach to send a message to a large group of e-mail addresses. Here’s why:
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