Here’s what’s been going on at Netmix:

Email List Clean Up

I’ve been working hard over the last few weeks to solve our email notification issues and clean up our email list database. We’ve been using Email Notification, a Wordpress plug-in, that sends an email to list subscribers as new posts are published.

The plug-in was created by Brian Groce of Watershed Studio over 3 years ago. It’s a neat tool, but it hasn’t been updated for approximately 2-years now. According to an email exchange with Brian yesterday, there will be an update to the plug-in very soon, which is something we are definitely excited about.

Remember, Wordpress is a free CMS and the 3rd party developers who create plug-ins to enhance the Wordpress do it to for free or suggested donations, mainly to contribute to the community of Wordpress users, with the understanding that things aren’t perfect and plug-in updates are not on a posted schedule. Although the expectation by the community is that these plug-ins will be supported, having to wait for developers to find the time to upgrade the software many bloggers come to depend on is simply a fact of life in the Open Source environment.

Since the guys at Water Shed were busy on other projects, Email Notification was last updated over 2-years ago. In the meantime, other developers created email subscription and notification plug-ins that would do the trick as well.

We found a neat plug-in called, Subscribe2. It’s fairly robust, in that it provides a post notification mechanism as well as a system to allow subscribers to sign up to receive notifications for specific categories and not for others. It also sends an unsubscribe link with every post (as does Email Notification), which adheres to the Can Spam Act anyone using email marketing techniques or post notifications must adhere to.

That being said, we kind of pissed off a few people this week when we turned off the Email Notification plug-in, which cause the unsubscribe link in an email notification for a post to return a “404 Not Found” server error. As you can see, sorting all this out is an intensive effort that can take some time.

In the Subscribe2 administration area, which can be accessed through the Wordpress admin, HTML and other messaging can be added to the email template for presentation purposes. Definitely an important feature for bloggers who want to create brand consistency.

The issue we found with Subscribe2 is that it conflicts with so many other Wordpress plug-ins, we just can’t use it. Our list of plugins Subscribe2 has an issue with include:

• WP-CC - Creative Commons plug-in
• WP-reCaptcha- Installs the reCaptcha module to issue Captcha codes for sign up and comments
• WP-SpamFree - Guards against comment spam
• WP-ContactForm - A simple contact form
• WP-Affiliate - An affiliate store plugin that works with Commission Junction
• WP-AjaxEditComments - Ajaxification of comment editing

The developers also list conflicts with:

• Podpress
• ShareThis
• Popularity Contest

To find plug-in conflicts, a Wordpress blog administrator has to turn off all plug-ins except for the one you want to test against. Then, you have to turn on each additional plug-in one at a time and replicate the action that cause the error in the first place. It’s quite a pain in the ass, to tell you the truth. We Googled “Wordpress Plug-In Conflict Catcher,” but such a tool does not yet exist, which leaves it open for someone to build it. Whoever does if first may get rich, because a need definitely exists.

On major issue is the inability for these plug-ins to receive bounce notifications and move email addresses that time out or are bad off the main list for deletion. This forced us to look outside to email service providers like iContact. We signed up for the the free test and then added our entire list, which did contain many old and irrelevant addresses, to their system. Although this wouldn’t solve our post notification situation, because Wordpress doesn’t integrate with iContact’s online system, we thought it would at least be helpful to move our email list to the service for newsletter purposes and email clean-up.

Well, we quickly found out that iContact doesn’t like it when you try to use their system to clean up your list. They suggest up to 250 addresses for their trial. We thought that meant you could send to up to 250 addresses. We didn’t realize they meant that you can only add 250 addresses. They quickly shut us down and then disabled our account, all with a bit of a snooty attitude, like we were trying to game their system or something.

So, what’s one to do when you want to clean up your email list and the online services won’t give you the time of day? We weren’t really sure, but last week while I was walking around the Apple Store on 14th Street and 9th Avenue in New York’s meat packing district, I stumbled upon a $49 software program called EmailCampaign (www.macXware.com). The writing on the box said, “Everythign you need to design & deliver a targeted email marketing campaign.” Huh? I thought for $49 bucks I’d try it out.

The Mac-only sofware comes with a Verifier that will check your entire email list by pinging the email server of each address to determine whether the email is valid. Import your list as a .CSV file, hit “start” and it runs in the background while you do your other work. There is a progress window, which displays a running tally of results. You can watch the program run through the list and check off “Valid Addresses,” “Bad Addresses,” or show you “Test Unsuccesful.”

We have yet to use it for an email newsletter blast, because we’re still busy working through the 3K email addresses we need to clean up, many which we’ve now discovered are old and need to be removed.

One caveat to Verifier is that as you run through the list and remove email addresses, it doesn’t update the main file. So, make sure to export the new list to filter out the names you want removed. We found this out the hard way, after running the program for a day. I had to reboot the computer without saving my work and had to start all over again.

School

For those of you who don’t know, I am working towards my Bachelor Degree in Digital Communications and Media at New York University. It’s been a five-year project that I am 8 credits shy of completing. Since I’ve been going to school, working either full-time or as a consultant, and trying to maintain a relationship with my lovely girlfriend, Missy, it’s been a challenge to keep Netmix updated on the daily. A blog is a time consuming effort. In order to stay relevant and drive traffic, you have to post constantly. To be successful, some say as much as twenty times a day!

Well, I don’t have time for posting twenty times a day, so I’m enlisting the help of some friends to start contributing to the site. You’ll start to see posts from them soon.

Today, I have a summer algebra final, which I must go study for. I know…algebra in the summer, especially for 12-weeks straight, is like an extended root canal. I can’t wait until it’s over.

Virgin Mobile Festival

This weekend, with algebra out of the way, it’ll be nice to have some free time to cover the Virgin Mobile Festival, which takes place at Pimlico Raceway in Baltimore, MD. After my final tonight, I’ll be posting the schedule of events. I’m looking forward to seeing Lupe Fiasco on Saturday and Kanye West on Sunday. Stay tuned.

DJ Times Expo

Of course, I try to fit everything I can into a 24-hour schedule, so why not hit the DJ Times Expo in Atlantic City on Monday, which is the day after the Virgin Mobile Fest. As if I’m not doing enough, right? Stay tuned for more info on the DJ Times Expo as well.

Okay…I’m off to study y=mx+b. See ya!

Tony Z.