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…

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.

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.

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.

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.*