What is the best productivity tool in the world?

The to do list. The to do list combined with discipline to single task.

You don’t really need a smartphone with a really complicated scheduling and alarms system that can wake up you from your deep sleep even if you were dreaming about being Batman in The Dark Knight (In my dreams I am Joker). A simple scribling pad and a

Destroy Procrastination: Break Down Large Tasks

Goals are sometimes scary – especially big ones. The thought of accompishing them makes my leg go still and my whole body stiffen up. But once you break them down to smaller chunks, they become far more manageable. The fear that the big goal induces in your mind often makes you procrastinate on the task. Because of the scale of the task, you estimate that you need a lot of time to finish the task and it needs to be done at one go. For example you may try to write a book on say.. lenses for your photography blog.

Get More Mindspace: Empty Your Mind

You and I…We share a common problem – at any given time, we have 10-20 things running in our head. Ooh.. I have to to put money away in savings account, have to get detergent, must pay web hosting bill, and so on. These sort of thinking just keeps us from reaching our full potential. It ruins the decisions we make in our lives, removes clarity and confidence in your decisions and actions. You can’t sleep well. Generally you are just that much more miserable.

Set time aside -about 10 minutes everyday to meditate. Make it a point to think about nothng. Your subconscious mind will automatically send you the thoughts that have been running in your head. Write each and every task that your mind reminds you to do. Then go out and do it.

The home for your newsletter. Many consider it to be the foundation of an online business. The choice of service or software to use for email marketing is VERY important because once you start gathering subscribers, moving your newsletter to a new service or software may

1. cost money – you may have to hire a web developer to export the subscribers from the database. This is if your autoresponder software or service doesn’t have a export to CSV file feature.
2. cost time - you have to wait on your web developer to export the subscribers from your web application to a csv file.
3. cost subscribers – third party email marketing service require subscribers to confirm joining your newsletter again if you are importing them with a csv file. They do this to ensure that spammers cannot misuse their service by importing vast databases of email addresses that they don’t have permission to contact. This prevents their servers and ip addresses (which cost money) from getting blacklisted by spam directories. But requiring subscribers to opt-in again will surely cause you to lose some of them.

The choice of email marketing software is like buying a laptop. You do it once and hopefully don’t change for a long long time.

The Email Marketing Platform CheckList

Below are some features that are necessary beyond the very basic functionality of a email newsletter software of taking subscribers and sending broadcasts.

Exporting Subscribers – You don’t want your newsletter held hostage by a software or service. Make sure the platform you choose has the functionality to export your subscribers to a .csv file. The format (CSV) in which the subscribers are exported is important too because other software or services recognize that format.

Autoresponder – When running a newsletter you want to give your subscribers the feel that they are getting personalized attention. This can be done only if you have a follow up autoresonder feature with which you can schedule follow up email to your subscribers.

Custom Fields – As part of finding out which of your efforts are getting the most results, you would to attach some attributes to your subscribers. The attribute may be the website from which the subscriber landed on your website before subscribing to your newsletter. Your email marketing software should let you add single line text box, mulitple choice and hidden custom fields.

Scheduling Broadcasts – The email marketing software should not dictate your working schedule. You don’t want to be awake at 12am to send a broadcast to your subscribers for your product launch. This means the email newsletter software should allow you to schedule the email broadcast to go out at a particular time and go home.

Get HTML code for subscription form – To get as many subscribers as possible you want to put the subscription form on your blog, on a HTML landing page, within a blog post or anywhere. Your platform should allow you to do this. This means the email marketing platfom should have a screen where you can get the HTML code for the subscription form.

Third Party Autoresponders

Below are some autoresponder services that are highly reputed 2 of which I have used in the past.

1. Aweber – This is the most popular email marketing service. The de facto standard for online autoresponder service. Has the more features than any other autoresponder service. I terminated the account because I didn’t need it anymore.
2. GetResponse – Very similar in features and pricing to Aweber.
3. MailChimp - This is a very good email autoresponder service if you are just starting out. It allows you to have upto 500 subscribers for free. In the free account they insert an ad for their service in your outgoing email.

Which one is for you?

If you are short on cash go with MailChimp. Use their autoresponder feature judiciously to make some money, reinvest your earnings to upgrade your account.If you can afford to spend money, go with Aweber. They are very easy to use and have more features, especially the email analytics feature, than any other autoresponder.

Advantage of 3rd Party Email Newsletter Software:

Higher Deliverability: Paid autoresponder services have an agreement with the major ISPs so that emails that are sent by their clients don’t get blacklisted as spam. Emails that are sent using these services don’t land in the Junk mail folder or rejected on receipt.

Actually, the deliverability between a self hosted and a paid autoresponder service is the same. All email that is sent by a self hosted email autoresponder will get delivered, initially. However with self hosted email autoresponders, there is a higher risk of your server getting blacklisted as spam in some spam server directory like spamhaus. When that happens your email deliverability will go down as a lot of subscribers will either not receive your email or will get them in the junk email folder

Cost Can Be Predicted: With third party autoresponders, you will not have unforeseen expenses. The cost of Aweber for a year starting with 2000 subscribers and growing at 100 subscribers a day can be predicted.

Disadvantages of Hosted Email Marketing Tools:

Charge By Subscriber Count – Most autoresponder services charge depending on the number of subscribers in your newsletter. More the subscribers you get, the costlier it becomes. It used to be the case that it costed $19 a month whether you had 1000 or 100,000 subscribers at Aweber. But you can’t get that pricing anymore.

Importing Lists Require Confirmation From Subscribers – Sometimes you may want to import subscribers from another email autoresponder service through a CSV file. When you do this with paid autoresponder services like Aweber, they will send an email to each subscribers in your import file confirming if they want to be in your new newsletter. This is a problem because you will lose some subscribers as a result of this import.

Self Hosted Email Newsletter Software

Self hosted email autoresponders are web applications that you install in your web server.

PHPList – This is a free open source software. It is the oldest and the most widely used one. Unfortunately it is extremely user-unfriendly. It can be difficult to use. The subscription form code cannot be generated and copied to your own web page if you don’t have knowledge of HTML as PHPList provides its own subscription page even which is a bit difficult to customize. You can use it if you are comfortable with editing HTML code.

WP Responder Wordpress Plugin – This is the plugin I created for my blog. I needed an alternative to buying an autoresponder service and the available RSS feed to Email services like FeedBurner and FeedBlitz. With this plugin you can create newsletters, create follow up messages for subscribers to receive, provide email subscription to your blog, use blog posts as follow up email, provide subscription to particular categories in your blog.

Which one is for you?

I recommend using WP Responder to build a newsletter because it is much easier to install this plugin – you don’t have to create an additional database. The installation is the same as any other wordpress plugin. You can easily learn to use it even if you don’t know coding. I made WP Responder with Internet Marketers in mind. I took the best features from Aweber and added them to the Wordpress dashboard in a way you would expect them to be there. Click here to download WP Responder.

1. Place a subscription box in all of your websites in all pages

You want to website visitors give all possible opportunities to opt-in to your newsletter. Remove all possible effort for a subscriber to add themselves to your newsletter. Put your subscription box in all of the pages in all of your relevant websites. If you have websites about affiliate marketing, Internet marketing and email marketing place opt-in boxes in all of these websites to your Internet marketing newsletter.

More importantly try to place them above the fold – the section of the website the user sees when they land on your website without having to scroll down. Placement is very important. Another great place to place the opt-in code is right below each article in your website where readers are bound to be looking after they read an article.

For wordpress blog: If you have a wordpress blog in which you want to insert the autoresponder opt-in code, go to the admin panel and go to Appearance > Widgets. Add a text widget and insert the code for the autoresponder. Some wordpress themes have a separate region for each page type.

The wordpress CMS has two content types – posts and pages. So there may be some regions that contains the widgets that show in the pages only and another that has widgets that will shown in your pages. If your theme has that, make sure you create a text widget and insert it into each of the regions.

For a drupal website: If you have a drupal website, you must add a block to your website by going to Administer > Site Building > Blocks. Click on add block and insert the code for the opt-in form .

For your website that has plain HTML pages – use a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver or Kompozer and open up every page and insert the code of the autoresponder subscription form in all of the pages in your website.

2. Offer a bonus for subscribing

Most of us we can’t get subscribers merely by having a subscription form on all pages. That only works if you are a celebrity and your website content is regularly updated and forms a deep connection with your readers like say.. steve pavlina. Your website visitors will need a compelling reason to subscribe to your newsletter. To get theme to subscribe you ahve to give something away in return for subscribing to your newsletter.

Create a small ebook that promises some benefit that your subscribers. For example, you could create a book that shows how to get a 70% discount on buying a particular model camera for your photography newsletter.

Anything that saves time, money, effort will be a good fit for potential subscribe to join your newsletter. It may not be a book, it may also be a software tool. Oh, and try to  make the benefit an instant one. “How to speed up your computer by 400% instantly!” will get more subscribers than the one I suggested above. People love instant benefits.

Once you create the ebook or software that you want to give away in return for their email address, configure your autoresponder software to send the subscriber a link to the software or ebook.

3. More traffic from relevant sources

Very very few, actualy no one, who visits your website by clicking on a link in a site about japanese cartoons is going to subscribe to your newsletter about dog training. They will find the website very irrelevant and will click away immediately.

If your website receives traffic from relevant sources like – other websites about pets and dog training. You could try to submit content to those websites in return for a link to your website. Many website owners will not like the idea but many will. You could also offer to give them a link exchange for a link.

4. Guest post on relevant blogs

Almost any topic on which you can start a newsletter has a blog on the topic today. Blogs are again, the same as relevant traffic sources but they must be covered separetely because blogs are like newsletters. In many cases, blogs ARE newsletters when the blog owner provides email subscription. Submit a article to a relevant blog and link to your landing page from the blog artice.

For example if you have a newsletter on dog training and you find a blog on pet grooming, you could write an article on dog grooming for the blog. Apart from mentioning your website in your blog article as part of the author information, include relevant links to your website in the article itself.

Placing a link to your website will be barely enough for most readers to click through to your website. But if the content on your website to which you are linking is relevant to the topic of the article and somehow adds value to the reader, then they are more likely to clickthrough to it.

In other words, get creative and think up article ideas to write for relevant blogs in which you can shamelessly plug in links to your websites pages and landing pages.

Performancing has a great article on finding guest post opportunities on blogs

5. Test And Tweak Your Traffic Sources

The best traffic sources vary from niche to niche. Sometimes the way this will work will be counterintuitive. Your newsletter about freelance programming may receive more subscribers who came to your website from a forum like sitepoint than from writing guest posts on blogs like freelance switch (hypothetically). Only way you can know this is by testing your traffic sources.

Many autoresponder software and services like WP Responder provide a means to place a code in the subscription form. There is no tool that does this directly without needing some programming to be done. But here’s what I would do to find out where most of my subscribers are coming from:

All autoresponder tools allow you to add a custom field. The field can be a text field (like address, phone number) or a multiple choice question (like sex, age, country) or it can be hidden. the hidden custom field is not shown on the web page but it is still there in the page, the value of which is set in the HTML code of the page.

To track the source of traffic that gets me the most traffic, I will add a hidden field to the subscription form, put the code in the web page then add a javascript program that sets the value of this hidden custom field (lets call this custom field TS) when the page loads to the URL of the site from which visitor landed on your website. This way all of my subscribers will get a URL attached to their subscription that mentions which website they came from when the subscribe to the newsletter.

There will be many traffic sources but a selected few traffic sources will be sending majority of your traffic. You can see which ones these are if you see the list of subscribers in your autoresponder software.  Once 1000-1200 people opt-in to my newsletter I will check how many people came  from each of my traffic sources by counting the number of people with a TS value equal to each of the dominating traffic sources.

Once you find which one of them is giving you the most subscribres, you can focus more of your efforts on that traffic source and eliminate the poor performing ones. Now that I think about it, you can also use Google analytics to accomplish the same by using the goals feature. Here’s how:

Normally you must have three pages – one page where website visitors land on your website, the page where visitors are taken after they enter their subscription information (this one is optional)

and the page they see once they click on the opt-in confirmation email. Suppose these are the three pages:

• Landing – http://mysite.com/landing.html
• Request Confirmation Page – http://mysite.com/pleaseconfirm.html (optional if you are relying on the page generated by your autoresponder service/software)
• Confirmed Subscription Page – http://mysite.com/confirmed.html

Here’s how to configure google analytics to record each traffic source and the number of subscribers that come from there:

1. add the google analytics code in your landing page, and in your confirmation page so that you know where all of your confirmed subscribers are coming from.
2. go to Google analytics and create a conversion goal.
3. add each of the URLs above.

This way Google analytics can be configured to record one successful conversion everytime someone subscribes to the newsletter. Google analytics also tracks where each those successful conversions, that is subscribers, came from by traffic source. So you can get a clear idea of which traffic sources are sending you the most number of subscribers.

One of the most important part of running an online business is making decisions. Our everyday work involves making many decisions – decisions on which market to target, which contractor to choose, which employee to hire, etc. These decisions, I am sure you agree, are to be made on sound logical thinking void of any bias or emotion to make the right decision, make more money and achieve our goals.

Our brains were not made to think. They were made to react. The first time we touched fire and burnt our skin we learnt what to do the next time we encounter fire. The ability to think is just a side effect just like the ability to play awesome 3D action games on a personal computer that was made to run word processors and spreadsheets. Back in the day this serves us well – we needed to react instantly. The world was a dangerous place and these reactions helped us survive.

Now We React Less, Think More

Today we don’t do as much reacting as we used to do. We do a lot more thinking. We are not in danger of being eaten by a tiger. Our brain is wired to find quick and dirty reactive solutions which are not always the best solutions. These are good when we are trying to survive in a rain forest but not so good when trying to negotiate a contract or forming a business deal.

Most people attempt to solve problems by playing around with the issues at hand and then making decisions based on faulty logic, biases, emotions, cognitive dissonance resolution and other shortcuts. We may rationalize our decisions afterward, but in reality our solutions are based almost entirely on gut feelings, emotional reactions, and hidden biases. As a result, our solutions tend to be no more valid than the architectural designs built by a child playing with blocks.

Almost everyone makes irrational decisions

Most people make decisions about a problem at hand based on faulty logic, biases, emotional and reactive thinking. A lot of time our decisions are just reactions. Once we make the decision and act on it, we rationalize our decisions after we made them gathering logical reasons to support the decision. But in reality our solutions came from gut feelings and emotional reactions and hidden biases which we are not aware that we have. As a result we make many irrational decisions in our professional and personal life.

One of the many reasons we don’t make well thought out decisions is because of biases. In this  post series I will go into the various factors that color our decisions and keep us from making correct decisions in our personal and professional lives.

There are many biases under which we act. One such bias is confirmation bias.

Confirmation Bias

It is a tendency of people to prefer information that confirms preconceptions, hypotheses whether or not they are true. It will cause us to reject and forget evidence that proves the contrary of our biases. It makes us ignore/devaule information/evidence that is in contrary to our beliefs. This bias causes people to prefer information that confirms their preconceived notions. It makes you see what you want to see. Confirmation biases lead to faulty decision making.

For example: you may believe that astrology actually works. As a result of confirmation bias you’ll remember only those instances when when the prediction in the astrology column came true and forget the majority of the cases when the prediction was very wrong. As a result you will continue to believe astrology has some base in reality.

What are the effects of confirmation bias?

1. Creates beliefs on false premises

If you act under confirmation bias you will believe claims that aren’t true – they have no basis in reality. We all get some vague hypothesis in our minds. When acting under confirmation bias you will seek only the evidence that proves the hypothesis to be true. Even if you come across evidence that clearly contradicts the hypothesis. You will come across evidence that will prove the contrary but you will ignore than and will not remember them. So you will believe a claim or hypothesis that is not true.

To make matters worse, our beliefs aren’t isolated. Our sub conscious mind forms beliefs by inference based on existing beliefs. Beliefs combine together to form more beliefs. More faulty irrational decisions.

2. Creates Outdated Beliefs

It can cause outdated beliefs. A belief you held would have been true at a time. But because of confirmational bias you will ignore evidence that built up over time that show that your belief is no longer true.

For example, let’s say you believe that creating and submitting youtube is the best way to market a blog. You tirelessly make videos everyday and submit them to youtube. Although it worked once or twice, you will ignore all the e

3. Keeps You Acting In Outdated Behavior

When you have outdated beliefs you keep acting in old ways. For example, long after buying television advertising isn’t working you may keep buying television advertising when doing so is not profitable anymore. Under confirmation bias. You will have forgotten all the instances when your company incurred a loss and will only remember the instances when there was some profit.

4. Shows you a pattern where there isn’t any pattern

Confirmation bias makes you see patterns where there are no patterns.

5. Gives you fictional experiences

Researchers at California Institute of technology conducted a experiement as a part of a research:

They scanned the brains of 21 volunteer wine novices. They were administer tiny tastes of wine, measuring the senseation in the medical orbitofrontal cortex, the part of the brain where flavor responses register. The subjects were told the price of the wines without their knowledge they tasted the same wine twice.

They invariably preferred the one they thought was more expensive.

Why should you be concerned about confirmation bias?

1. For A Realistic View Of The World – Our beliefs act as filters of reality. To have a realistic view of the world we must question our beliefs deliberately and consciously and find out if they are based in reality or are they just a result of having sought confirmation for some vague notion that entered our mind.
2. To Make Rational Decisions - Confirmation biases cloud our decisions. When we form beliefs on this kind of bias, we delude ourselves. We always form decisions based on beliefs we already hold

What are the real world products of confirmation bias?

1. Psychics – A psychic who claims to know about your deceased relative will give very general descriptions about the relative and their relationship with the client. They say something like “why do I sense this distance” and the client goes “yeah, ronnie didn’t like it when I talk about our relationship”. The client mistakenly believes that the psychic actually has “psychic” powers.
2. Lawyers – The job of the lawyer is to gather evidence and make the case for a particular side of a court proceeding. Whether or not that’s true. Gather evidence that proves it – confirms it and present it at the court.
3. Politicians – Politicians make a living by telling you what the public want to hear. Politicians appease the public sentiment even if the public supports and wants slavery. Politicians sell hope -”change we can believe in”. They echo the opinion of the general public and get the most votes.
4. Placebos – Placebo are medicinal tablets used to “treat” patients. These tablets are basically nothing. It is usually a capsule filled with sugar. The patient is told that the capsule is a very powerful medicine and they should absolutely take the course of the treatment religiously. The patient doesn’t know that it’s an inert tablet and somehow they get better anyway.
5. Magic tricks
6. Wine tasters
7. Conspiracy theories (moon landing, world trade center, etc)
8. Books like Outliers, The Tipping Point, Freakonomics, Superfreakonomics

What can you do about confirmation bias?

1. Ignore The polarized, Neutralize Your Customers/Audience

There are some people you simply cannot persuade, ignore them. As for the others, , put your audience and customers in a state of persuadability. That is why before you persuade your prospects to buy from you or trying to persuade your blog subscribers or newsletter subscribers, you must:

1. Establish Common Ground: Gain their attention and trust by establishing your common ground. Make it clear to them that you share their views and values.
2. Present Your Logic: present your arguments that logically lead your audience to the conclusion.
3. Call To Action: Ask your audience to perform the action that you want them to – buy your product or service, subscribe to your newsletter, donate to your cause or whatever else action you want them to take.

2. Clean out your belief system

You already have many beliefs made on confirmation bias. To  make sound decisions you must have a realistic view of the world. For a realistic view of the world you must form beliefs objectively without bias. You have to take the time to actively question your beliefs. It takes a great deal of courage and effort to question your most fundamental beliefs.

Examine your feelings closely and be brutally honest with yourself. Don’t worry about someone reading what you’ve written down. First get it out. The truth really does set you free. Sometimes we think we believe something that the majority of society believes but we really believe something else.

This means you must purposely set time aside for a few days, sit quietly, grab a pen and paper and start examining your beliefs consciously.

3. Analyze information objectively

We get information from all kinds of sources – television, friends, colleagues, newspapers, rss feeds, websites are some of them. We make decisions based on the information we receive. Start analyzing the information objectively – check the sources.

I’ve found that other people are a major source of illogical, distorted and biased opinions disguised as facts. Many people will not take it lightly when you question their every opinion and may get offended and shun from being open to you. Tread carefully.

E-mail marketing is the best marketing channel whether:

1. you want to brand yourself as an expert
2. get more clients to your services business
3. get repeat business from your existing customers
4. convert  more of your website’s visitors into customers

Today there are a lot of ways to build an audience:

1. You can gather followers on twitter
2. You can write a blog
3. You can create a facebook page and have people sign up to it.
4. Create a myspace profile and get fans and friends who will receive your updates.

We hear a lot of news articles that say email is losing out to SMS, then we heard that email is losing out to social media and so on. Many have started peddling products that claim that social media is the best way to reach your audience and somehow email is falling out of fashion and is losing its effectiveness.

Social Media : Not Suited For All Audiences

These are the “latest” ways to get an audience and keep them. But following a blog through an RSS feed, creating a facebook account and joining a facebook page, creating a twitter account and adding users to it are all not simple tasks for the ordinary internet user. It requires a certain level of internet proficiency.

Lot of people use twitter just because it is the hip thing to do today, because their friends are doing it. It could be something else tomorrow. Remember MySpace? Before twitter and facebook, having a myspace page was the most hip “web 2.0” thing to do.

Social media is not new. It was always there – people were talking on bulletin boards way back in the early 1990s.

Email Will Always Be The Most Important Communication Channel

People increasingly prefer to use social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter to have informal conversations with each other. But that doesn’t mean email is going to become obsolete any time soon.

Email is very deeply ingrained into our work culture and everyday life. Lot of important communication still relies on your email address. Your paypal account, your internet banking notifications, communication from your employer all need emails.

It will always be the most important communication channel because it will always be there. People will always need their email addresses to verify their user accounts which they are opening today and will keep 10 years from now. You can’t replace a communication channel like email with a company/website like facebook.

Sending and receiving an email is the first thing everyone learns when they learn to use the internet.  It has the least learning curve. People will write emails, and check them for a long time to come.

I joined twitter by peer pressure. I didn’t do it because I liked it when I first started using it. I joined facebook because lots of my friends were doing it too. It took me a while to actually *get* what the fuss about facebook really is. Twitter? I still don’t get it. The point is – I’m thinking if a very computerate guy like me can’t get it quickly, it is going to be hard for a lot of people to learn to use these sites.

You can always safely assume that your audience members have an email address. You can always talk to them via email.

A lot of satisfaction comes out of being able to solve your own problems when it comes to software.

The real world doesn’t allow you to create matter out of thin air, move things from one place to another with no effort. If you have a backache you must go to the pharmacist and get medicine.

If you know how to create software, you can scratch your own itches. If you can’t afford a particular software but have plenty of time, you can sit down and create it on your own. Theoretically. You may not be able to create your own Microsoft Word 2007 but this works for many real world problems.

WP Responder is one such itch that I had. I couldn’t buy Aweber’s services because it either costed too much or because they didn’t have a subscribe via PayPal option. Just then I graduated from college and had a lot of time on my hands. I got to work on creating a wordpress plugin that will both deliver blog posts and allow me to have a email newsletter.

I needed to create a membership site without spending $180s on a software like Amember. I went to work on Drupal and found the exact set of modules and their configurations that will let me create a paid membership website with unlimited levels.

There will come a time when trying to solve your own problem will start to cost more than buying a readymade solution. Until you get there leverage your programming skills to solve your own problems and get to the next level of financial independence.

In this release, I have added the following features:

• Ability to attach images inline with HTML e-mail – In version one and pretty much everywhere else, HTML e-mails were sent simply by inserting the HTML code in the e-mail and adding the necessary headers. If you had images in the e-mail they would be blocked by almost all e-mail clients and webmail clients today. HTML e-mail specification allows attaching e-mail within the body of the email so that e-mail clients don’t block the images and force you to provide an alternate version.
• Set the number of e-mails that can be sent in an hour – Most web hosting servers limit the number of e-mails that can be sent in an hour. If your server exceeds this limit the host may queue up your excess emails and send them in the next hour like my host (thank you namecheap!) or suspend your account and put up a nasty message for your visitors to see. I have changed the plugin to send a fixed number of e-mails every hour. This limit can be configured under the Settings page in the newsletter section in your admin panel

Previously this plugin used the PHPMailer PHP library. In this version I have changed it to the Swift Mailer PHP Library which I found more suited to this particular application as this library is faster and consumes less server resources. This library also makes a few interesting features that I am planning to implement in the next version much easier which means the next version will be released within the one month.

These are some minor changes in this version. Besides these, this version removes some common bugs in the program.

Download

Download the new version from the spanking new website I’ve created for the plugin:

Features Unimplemented

There are some practical difficulties in implementing couple of features that I had promised earlier so I have decided against implementing them in this version.

Chicklet Generator – Unfortunately I haven’t been able to add the subscriber count chicklet generator in this version because of some difficulties in implementing the feature. The feature turned out to be much more complicated than I imagined it to be.

I don’t want to add a feature without testing it and which may end up causing major problems for your web hosting server.

The chicklet generator is supposed to generate an image file that shows the number of subscribers for a particular newsletter. The subscriber count image is generated by PHP by fetching the subscriber number using a database query. If this query is executed every time the image is loaded, your server could get overloaded and become very slow. The solution I’ve come up with is to generate the image once every day and serve it to the reader for the rest of the day.

Skip sending post by e-mail – In version 1.0 it was possible to skip sending a blog post to e-mail subscribers by checking a checkbox in the "Add New" or "Edit" interface. But there were some bugs that led to this feature causing some major problems with approving comments. I felt fixing this was one hairy mess that is better demolished and built from scratch.

I will be adding more customization fields in the "Add New" and "Edit" pages:

• Customize the e-mail that e-mail subscribers receive for a particular blog post. You will be able to add custom field placeholders while writing blog posts and they will be automatically substituted in the e-mails sent when that post is published.
• Skip sending a blog post by e-mail if it hasn’t already been sent
• See the progress of mailouts – Since the e-mail is sent in batches, it becomes possible to see how many subscribers received their e-mails.

I Need Your Help!

The past two months have been very difficult for me with me having 9 hour hectic work days so I haven’t been able to get much work done on this plugin. But I want you to know I haven’t fell asleep at the wheel. I want to create the best free Wordpress autoresponder plugin that will help anyone build a following without any investment.

I created this plugin to learn how to create wordpress plugins as well as solve a problem that I was facing. There is plently of room for improvement in this plugin.

How you can help?

• File bug reports – If you find that the plugin isn’t sending. I really
• Request features – I am listening. Use the contact form, use the feature request form. I want to know what you need.

Why Is This Not In The Wordpress Repository

Adding this plugin to the Wordpress plugin repository serves absolutely no purpose for me at all. I don’t have patience to endure their long and strict approval process. In my opinion the rules there are geared to help Wordpress.org and the Wordpress brand more than the plugin developer.

Once I submit this plugin to the repository no body who uses it is going to care what happens to the guy who developed it. Users will happily click on the automatic updater and praise Wordpress and write on how convenient it is for them to manage their blog with. Besides, the wordpress people haven’t exactly been nice to wordpress developers.

I really don’t care if my plugin doesn’t meet the Wordpress coding standards or if another Wordpress plugin developer feels like I have verbally abused his mother while reading my source code. This is a very useful software. That is what truly matters. I will be distracted from this goal if I put this plugin in the wordpress directory. I don’t want my freedom to link to someone FROM MY WEBSITE be taken away from me for a entry in the wordpress directory which may or may not bring me anything.

This plugin is my hard work and I am not about to give all the benefits of my work (traffic, recognition, business) to someone else in the name of sharing and openness and community. That is just stupid.

As a result you won’t receive the update messages in the plugin page. I can however give you regular updates and support this plugin if you subscribe to this blog by e-mail or add yourself to the mailing list. As you can tell, I am thoroughly pissed at the Wordpress repository moderators for the trouble I have had to go through to submit a theme in the past.

–End Of Emotional Nonsense Rant

• Images in HTML emails can be attached as part of an email instead to overcome image blocking features in many mail clients and webmail providers.
• Some bugs in the post skipping has been resolved.
• A chicklet can be added to your sidebar that shows your current subscriber count.
• Hourly e-mail sending limits can be configured to avoid violating email policies of web hosts

I have been receiving emails from many readers regarding this plugin. Looks like I was not alone in needing something like this :)

I have been trying to get this release out quickly but my work has been making it hard to find time for it. If you’ve been reading this site recently, you will have noticed some major changes in the design as well as some bloopers here and there in the content as well. I am revamping the website to cater to a much larger audience.

Major Changes

I have decided to make ExpeditionPost to be about more than just developing websites and programming. I am going to write about my experience creating a self-funded business here. I believe this will be of value to many, especially to readers from India.

Hang on tight!

In this article I will go into the additional features that are supported by Actionscript.

Variable Declarations

Syntax:

var  variableName;

Sample:

var sample_var = 1;

Variable name rules: Name should not contain spaces, cannot be reserved actionscript keywords like if, for, do, while.

Strings

Strings are assigned to variables using a single quote or double quote.

var name = ‘raj’;
var anothername=”raj”;

Booleans

Booleans are assigned to either true or false. The words are lowercase and are reserved keywords.

var isAMonkey = true;

Strict Data Typing

Although variables are loosely typed it is possible to specify a type for your variables in Actionscript. This is also called variable type annotation. The following statement declares a variable of type Number. You can specify annotations for your own data type declarations also.

var mileage:Number=20;

var Ferrari:Car;

Functions

Functions are defined with the same syntax as Javascript. But actionscript supports specifying return type through type annotations similar to variable type annotations. Shown below are some sample declarations

function findInterest(principal,interest,time):number
{
…
}

Anonymous functions

An anonymous function is the same as normal functions but it is defined similar to declaring a variable.

var testFunction = function() {

doSomethin();

}

testFunction();

The difference is that anonymous functions should be fully defined before being executed but normal functions will get mapped to their definitions even if the definition falls after the part where the function is called.

Flow control and looping

Actionscript supports all the looping constructs that Javascript does:

While loops

while (expression)

{

//do something

}

For Loops

var y:Number=1;
for (var x:Number = 1; x <=5; x++)
{
     y=y*x;
}

Classes And Objects

Actionscript supports classes in a way similar to Javascript. Instead of relying on the function keyword to define functions, actionscript uses the following syntax:

Class Classname
{
   private var varName;
   public function funcName()
   {
   }

}

Here public and private are access specifiers. The first definition within the class is a class attribute. The second is a class method. Instantiating an object:

var newObj = new  ClassName();

If you are familiar with Java you will find actionscript’s syntax of defining classes very similar.

Packages

Packages are used to group related classes together.

package packageName
{

//class definitions

}

Static variables

Static variables are attributes that are defined as part of the class. These variables are not unique to each variable like instance variables. They are accessed by referencing the classname.

class ActionscriptBook
{
 public static pages:Number = 322;
}
var pages = ActionscriptBook.pages;

Getters and Setters

Actionscript supports creating getter and setter functions that control access to class variables.

class  Box {
private var side:Number;
public function get theSide():Number
 {
 return side;
 }
 public function set theSide(theNum:Number):Number
{
 side=theNum;
}
}

In this chapter we have learnt the basic actionscript syntax. In the next chapter, we will learn how to use the various components and how to place them within containers.

Most tutorials and books teach Flex on the assumption that you are going to use Flex Builder to write your flex applications. I prefer to think you will use your own IDE. Therefore, we will focus on making flex UIs using simple text editors like Notepad or TextMate.

Recap a few important points we have covered in the previous lesson:

1. MXML is used to layout user interface components like buttons and accordions on the canvas similar to laying out buttons and images on a web page.
2. MXML is compiled into Actionscript which is inturn compiled into binary SWF files. This means one can write flex applications entirely in Actionscript but it will be very laborious.
3. Actionscript is used to add behavior to flex elements similar to javascript being used to add behavior for HTML elements.

Actionscript – A New Language To Learn?

If you know Javascript, you know 95% of actionscript. Both languages have the same syntax. In fact both languages are derived from  the same language – ECMAScript. However, Actionscript has additional programming constructs like classes, variable type annotations, interfaces among others.

How Are Flex Applications Compiled?

Flex applications are a combination of mxml files that make up the user interface layout and the actionscript files that add the behavior to the user interface elements declared in the mxml file. The actionscript files are attached to the mxml file using special tags similar to using <script> tags to attach javascript files to html files.

They are compiled using the mxml compiler using the following command:

mxmlc nameOfFile.mxml

Here mxmlc is the flex sdk compiler and nameOfFile.mxml is your mxml program.

Steps Involved In Creating Flex Applications

The four steps involved in creating a flex application are:

1. Define and arrange the user interface widgets in the mxml file.
2. Write actionscript code to respond to events on these widgets.
3. Style the user interface using css if needed.
4. Create the swf file.

Creating a Simple Calculator application

In this chapter I will step through the process of creating a simple Flex application – a calculator.
This calculator will be a simple application. It will have the numbers from 0 to 9 and be able to add, subtract, multiply and divide. The final product is as shown below:

Step 1: Defining the user interface elements

Buttons – The buttons in this case are implemented as simple <mx:Button> elements.

Layout Of Buttons –The buttons are placed inside a grid layout of 235px width and 100% height. The grid has 4 rows – the first two rows have the operations, the third row has the operations and the last row has the reset button. This grid is set at an x-offset of 10px (from left) and y-offset of 35px (from the top).

Operands box – the text area where the current operand of the operation is displayed is given an absolute position (similar to the grid layout) of (x,y) = (10,10).

Step 2: Adding the behavior of the buttons

Handling Clicks On Number Buttons

Defining a function for each numeral button will be laborious. Therefore we will define one function that handles the user clicking on any of the number buttons. The argument to the function is the number which has to be appended to the entry in the Operands box.

Do not worry about the implementation of the event handler methods.

Handling Clicks On Operations Buttons

Similarly the operations keys also need to be attached to an event.

The Reset button also has a event handler to reset the operand displayer to 0 and to reset the internal variables used to perform calculations to their initial values.

Step 3: Style the user interface

In this step we would ideally change the style using some css styles however we would like to keep the default look and feel of the application therefore we will skip this step.

Step 4: Building the application

Let save this application under D:\temp as calculator.mxml. Once you install flex sdk and add the bin directory to your system’s path variable, you will be able to run the mxml compiler (called mxmlc) from any directory in the command prompt.

In windows, change to the directory where you saved your mxml file. In my case it is D:\temp. Then type the following command:

D:\temp>mxmlc calculator.mxml

When the compilation finishes a new file named calculator.swf is created in the same directory. This file can be embedded in your web pages and web applications.

You can get the basic implementation of the calculator here:

http://www.expeditionpost.com/codeexamples/flex/lesson1.zip

In the next chapter we will dive into the syntax of actionscript and how to use it to add behavior to flex interfaces.