Whoosh for Amazon AWS SES

Whoosh for AWS

After spend­ing a day and a bit last week hack­ing together a sim­ple mailer (with merge capa­bil­i­ties) for Amazon’s Sim­ple Email Ser­vice (it’s really pretty sim­ple) it struck me that there must be a bet­ter way to do this. I toyed with launch­ing a web app for oth­ers to use to sim­ply accom­plish the same thing, but fig­ured some­one, some­where, must’ve already done some­thing sub­stan­tially similar.

Turns out they have. Per­fect.

For us, SES was a great way to send once-off per­sonal mail beyond the vol­ume that our Apps for Domains accounts per­mit. The biggest down­side was Amazon’s rate lim­it­ing — some­thing that still applies for this app.

This app would’ve made the process a lot quicker, though I’m not sure of its value for reg­u­lar list email­ing — which seems to be how they’re mar­ket­ing it. You’re not just pay­ing to send emails with MailChimp/Campaign Mon­i­tor — you’re pay­ing for deliv­er­abil­ity and list man­age­ment. AWS give you the deliv­er­abil­ity side (at least, that was our expe­ri­ence) but do noth­ing to help you with unsub­scribes, updates, and tracking.

That said, if I’d found this a week ago…

# by Josh Street on March 23rd, 2011 Tags: , , , , , ,
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WordPress 3.0

I heard pre­cisely one per­son com­plain­ing loudly when Word­Press 3.0 first released but I’ve hit no snags so far — ele­gant, pain­less upgrade on Web­Fac­tion (Dis­clo­sure: I’ve got an affil­i­ate link in there, 10% of your spend — but I’d rec­om­mend them even if you want to strip the link out) which is more than can be said for most web hosts I’ve used over the years.

Admit­tedly I’m not using the most zany set of plu­g­ins in the world, but it’s nice to know that an open source project can be so darn pain­less. Upgrade, the water’s fine.

# by Josh Street on July 5th, 2010 Tags: , , , , , ,
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Equip Schools website

We recently refreshed one of our core prod­uct web­sites, Equip Schools. It hits a fairly com­plex mix of schools, parents/carers and indi­vid­ual stu­dents and we spent a lot of time try­ing to best artic­u­late how the pro­gramme speaks to the var­ied con­cerns of each of these groups.

The prod­uct has three curriculum-driven strands in the form of work­shops, pub­li­ca­tions and software.

The soft­ware strand is cer­tainly the most dis­tinct of the three in terms of con­ven­tional expec­ta­tions of life-skills / per­sonal man­age­ment pro­grammes that schools already run — and we’re still com­ing to terms with the best way to artic­u­late that within the web­site. We’ve devel­oped a brief (16 minute) train­ing DVD that accom­pa­nies the prod­uct — how­ever, this is obvi­ously too long for ini­tial con­tact and, while being highly explana­tory, doesn’t really artic­u­late the thou­sands of hours of edu­ca­tional psy­chol­ogy research and stu­dent men­tor­ing that inform the prod­uct as it stands today.

Dis­till­ing that down to a 10 minute pack­age is a tall ask, but it’s also some­thing near on the hori­zon as we seek to make this avail­able to indi­vid­u­als beyond the school context.

Missio, Cross’d worship, and why I’m not a recluse

What is a ‘mis­sion’? How do you rec­on­cile the mean­ing you asso­ciate with that and its Latin root, mis­sio, to send, and actual use of the term? Why do we talk about a “mis­sion to do x” and here­after refer to “mis­sion” as though it encom­passed “to do x” itself, rather than the act of sending?

What on earth is a life cen­tred on two bits of wood hur­riedly nailed together and stained crim­son? Do peo­ple wor­ship sym­bols on par­tic­u­larly sug­ary buns?

I think this web­site is a mea­sure of dis­con­tent­ment. I rarely post when there is noth­ing to grum­ble about, because good news is appar­ently bor­ing. This web­site makes me feel guilty. It’s one big occasionally-ugly mir­ror. I don’t look into it when things are good, and pour the bad into it the rest of the time inter­spersed with geeky things… a slightly acquis­i­tive load of rub­bish designed to obfus­cate and cre­ate a false set of val­ues that improve (in the eye of the beholder, for a time) the reflec­tion. It’s easy to for­get these things.

At any rate, blogs are a use­less jour­nal medium. Too much hap­pens in any given day. Yes­ter­day, I installed Quick­Books and realised that absolute morons are able to run their own busi­nesses with good rea­son and it needn’t be so hard after­all. *insert rant about software*

Tax is pre­dictably bor­ing stuff, though, so when Claud sug­gested we go see Becom­ing Jane (con­trary to rumours I dragged her along — though if she hadn’t, I would have done… we enjoyed it for dif­fer­ent rea­sons, I main­tain!) I was there in a mat­ter of… well, about an hour. Some­where in the mid­dle we went shop­ping for food & ate lunch. *insert rant about the film, about the won­der­ful speed-distraction medium that IM is, and maybe others*

Spent a lazy-enough after­noon at her house until a phone call promised poker and food of the bar­be­cued vari­ety at Gareth’s place, which ended in two par­tic­u­larly dim-witted hands, and some inter­est­ing read­ing of Time magazine’s global warm­ing issue. Some of the 51 ideas printed were on the mark, oth­ers seemed a lit­tle less so (energy effi­cient light­ing was one I know enough about to take issue with, hybrid cars were thank­fully nowhere that I could see). *insert rant about global warm­ing bandwagon*

Later, I started con­tribut­ing more car­bon by try­ing to drive Budd’s car (a man­ual, I’d only drive a man­ual lawn­mower in the past) as he lis­tened to his clutch slowly being torn to shreds. *insert rant about manual/auto trans­mis­sion and licens­ing and the like*

There are other funny sto­ries to be shared within that, but each of those com­prises an entire post of its own. I have no inter­est in chron­i­cling my life with that degree of detail. Per­haps if I were a Dick­in­son–esque recluse I’d have time enough to write and lit­tle enough to write about that I might write more. But thank­fully I’m not.

# by Josh Street on April 12th, 2007 Tags: , , ,
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Open Source Xara Xtreme

Open Source Xara Xtreme

Some­one alluded to this on a mail­ing list I’m a mem­ber of (Roy Schestowitz, on lyx-users), and, being the day before an exam and all, I couldn’t help but check it out. I remem­ber play­ing with Xara tools back in the day of bun­dled garbage on com­puter mag­a­zine CDs (that was also my first brush with a full ver­sion of Flash, at ver­sion 3, but that’s another story. I’d played with Future­S­plash some­time before then, too.) — it looks as though it’s come a long way.

I’ve used Sodipodi on Linux to do some use­ful things, but haven’t had a chance to play around with Inkscape yet… though it looks sim­i­lar, maybe even a fork? Def­i­nitely on the to-do list. Any­way, the folks at Xara want peo­ple to spread the word they’ve got a cool GPL’d app com­ing for the Linux desk­top (Mac OS too), and I think it’s a great thing for the Open Source com­mu­nity, which is why I’m pimp­ing it here.

There’s a ver­sion on their xaraxtreme.org site that is func­tional already, though it only views files at present… edit­ing func­tion­al­ity is… pre­sum­ably some way off.

I think if some­one offered Pan­tone swatches for sale with a good qual­ity open-source app, I’d go for it. Their busi­ness model seems solid enough after they’ve got it off the ground, but only time will tell. One hopes they stay around, because this appears to be a far bet­ter con­tri­bu­tion than Corel’s abortive attempts to launch a graph­ics app on the Linux desk­top (closed source, of course — Photo-PAINT 9, if I recall cor­rectly. It was a RAM-guzzling beast that I may have even enjoyed at the time — circa 2000 — had it not been for the fact that I was try­ing to run it on a middle-of-the-road Pen­tium (1) with 32MB of RAM) before their silent acqui­es­cence was pur­chased by Microsoft.

If noth­ing else, it’ll stir up the space a lit­tle bit and hope­fully the men­tion of open source will get otherwise-complacent Adobe inno­vat­ing again in the Mac space… or, alter­na­tively, it could go the other way and they might just ditch that plat­form alto­gether in favour of Win­dows, though I doubt it.

*Lis­tens as cre­atives the world over unite and raise arms in an unprece­dented rev­o­lu­tion against a soft­ware com­pany. Hey, it could happen.*

# by Josh Street on October 19th, 2005 Tags: , , , , , , , ,
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