Scott builds Software » Products

Magenta, watch out for Wordpress + Instinct

Scott — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 14:24:55 +0000

The Instinct e-commerce Plugin

This morning I met an independent designer in London. He designs and builds e-commerce sites for a number of small businesses and marketing agencies. His background is almost all design, so I was curious where he got his programming chops. Then he mentioned Wordpress.

Ah.

So how does he do commerce? What about Magenta, Authorize.net, Paypal, Ektron and all that? Nope. He uses Instinct, a rapidly growing e-commerce plugin for Wordpress from New Zealand. The plugin looks intriguing. LAMP commerce is deliciously powerful, especially if it has integration with several card processors. I’m going to give it a whirl.

iPod Touch Phone

Scott — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:17:01 +0000

UK-based Truphone, a VoIP service provider for Wifi/data enabled handsets, today unveils a special version for owners of the latest version of the iPod Touch.

– Tech Crunch, 12/3/08

I want one!

This has free WiFi calls, an iPod, iPod applications all wrapped in one little $229 device. To really top it off, how about a free interface to SMS that correctly intercepts and relays text messages from a given phone number?

Email for $5 a month

Scott — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 01:53:35 +0000

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:

Sign up for the enterprise email service, for 1 user, for $4.99
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.”
Request that BlueTie handle MX records for your domain using their online form.
Wait a few hours for DNS servers to catch up. Have a cup of coffee, go for a walk, see some friends.
Set up your email addresses so that BlueTie correctly routes username.enterprise to username@enterprise.com
Update your POP3 email client so that it uses pop.bluetie.com, port 110 for POP3, and smtp.bluetie.com, port 25 for SMTP