My wife runs a business where she provides office management services on demand, The Office To Go. I put together a little brochure-ware site for her after she bought the domain. As with most of my domains, I keep them on GoDaddy and refer them to various servers in the Amazon cloud.

GoDaddy provides rudimentary email services that appear to work. Naturally, one of her first clients tried to send her an email… and GoDaddy blocked it. So embarrassing. Why? The email contained a URL. I turned off spam filters. GoDaddy still blocked it, giving us the following error:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

xxxx@theofficetogo.com

Technical details of permanent failure:
Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 554 554 The message was rejected because it contains prohibited virus or spam content (state 18).

Frustrated, I started looking for cheap email accounts. Then I remembered someone Michael Eisenberg introduced me to way back in 2003, David Koretz, CEO of Blue Tie. Michael couldn’t say enough good things about David and his company. Blue Tie just cut a deal with IAC to handle a lot of email for the various web properties of Barry Diller. Very promising!

Within a few hours I had a deluxe email service for the low price of $4.99 a month. Here’s what it took:

1. Sign up for the enterprise email service, for 1 user, for $4.99
2. Change the MX Records at GoDaddy so they point to the BlueTie servers instead of GoDaddy’s secureserver.net. You can find this form by first clicking on “manage your domains” then click on “full DNS control.”
3. Request that BlueTie handle MX records for your domain using their online form.
4. Wait a few hours for DNS servers to catch up. Have a cup of coffee, go for a walk, see some friends.
5. Set up your email addresses so that BlueTie correctly routes username.enterprise to username@enterprise.com
6. Update your POP3 email client so that it uses pop.bluetie.com, port 110 for POP3, and smtp.bluetie.com, port 25 for SMTP

Scott Raymond’s “Ajax on Rails” contains a nifty trick for form fields, following the Rails mantra of DRY and convention over configuration. Creating a field with an associated label, error checking, and formatting is as simple as

This produces a label using the humanized “Phone: “, a <div> for holding validation errors, an input tag, and appropriate field values. Here’s a complete form using Scott’s hackery from page 298:

Scott’s magic is embodied in a form helper, LabelingFormBuilder. For yucks, I Googled in search of a Rails plugin by that name. I stumbled across labeling_form_builder from Seth Rasmussen. I peeked at the license. Seth cracked me up. Only in open source can you get away with this (words bleeped):

The power of blogs and social networks really hit home for me today.

Each week I read about thousands more being let go, and I think of the families, the private discussions they have at home, the stress of worrying about eating into savings that are already ravaged by the markets. Many of those engineers, marketers, administrators may live paycheck to paycheck, scared about what comes next. Its especially challenging when the economy is in the toilet.

Yesterday I remembered a favorite saying of Thomas Marban. The web is about authenticity, transparency, involvement.

Heavy recently had layoffs, and I was among those affected. Its an early stage venture, so that’s a risk we all take as technologists. I changed my online profile at LinkedIn, and let all my contacts know what’s happening. I then closed my laptop, joined my family for a night of festivities, and tried my best to forget about work for a while.

After playing football with my daughter today (she has an amazing arm at 10), I took a seat at my home office, flipped open my Macbook. Sitting in my Gmail were several leads, people reaching out to me, offering solace and ideas. An engineer at Scribd personally fixed my resume, which is now online! I never even met the guy.

One LinkedIn email floored me:

Not that you need to hear it from me, but you are no joke one of the smarter people I have ever met. You have a knack for explaining the most complex things in a much more simple form which is key to any CTO’s job. I was always very impressed with the way that your thinking process as well. Very impressive. It was always a pleasure to sit in on a meeting or even chat because I learned something new from you nearly every time.

I tell ya, that really made my day. Is it true? Who knows. All that matters to me is that he thinks so. I’ll believe it for today.

Social networks rock. I encourage anyone dealing with layoffs to reach out, tell your friends, start talking. You will find comfort in friends and family, which can only lead to what you need and deserve for all your hard work and dedication… a great job!