Author Archives: David

The Holy Trinity of Gmail Plugins

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First of all: You’re all using gmail, right? Right. Good.

There are three features in the gmail web client that I absolutely cannot live without:

  1. Auto reply all
  2. Send and archive
  3. Undo send

Auto Reply All

I find this to be the most valuable of the three. I used to break untold numbers of email threads by hitting ‘reply’ instead of ‘reply all’. No longer! Especially in a business environment when you have multiple correspondents more often than not, this should be the default. I was using it a couple of years ago when it was mysteriously removed, and I nearly cried.

Send and Archive

The only thing more satisfying than archiving email is archiving it automatically. As far as I’m concerned once I’ve sent a reply to an email the responsibility lies with the other party, so I’m perfectly happy to banish the conversation from my inbox until they respond.

Undo Send

Perfect for when you neglect to remove the placeholders from a form email, or realize that you’ve forgotten to add the links you promised you were going to send.

Others

I also use other labs features in gmail, but I think the ones I’ve mentioned are the ones I rely on the most. Here are the others in no particular order:

  • Multiple inboxes – I keep my starred mail visible in another inbox directly under my regular one so that I don’t forget about it.
  • Custom date formats – Because the month comes after the date.
  • Title Tweaks – Somewhat redundant now thanks to App Tabs, but still useful in some cases.

Free WordPress Hosting On PHPFog

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Last week I had cause to look for a cheap/free wordpress host for a project at work. WordPress.com was the instant first choice, but seeing as everyone on the project was an experienced web developer/designer, we found we needed a little more control than the free option offered us.

I had a quick think and remembered Edward extoling the virtues of PHPFog.

“It’s like Heroku for PHP!”

WordPress is written in PHP, and PHPFog (like Heroku) has a free plan with just enough resources to get a site off the ground.

“Perfect!” I thought. “There must be a way to get WordPress on there!”

Easy Peasy

Turns out there is, and it’s really easy. As soon as you create an account with PHPFog, you’re taken to a page with a big list of commonly installed apps that you can drop onto your (shared) app server and WordPress is right at the top.

From there it was a breeze: We filled in the login info we wanted and the PHPFog back end did the rest. It took a few minutes for everything to spool up, but once it did we had our very own Wordress installation to play with and tweak to our hearts content.

Scaling Up

Naturally the resources available on the free plan wouldn’t stand up to a huge amount of traffic, but at that point one could easily upgrade or export one’s content to be relocated elsewhere.

So, if you find yourself in need of a pop-up wordpress instance on the cheap, have a gander at PHPFog!

Why I Don’t Obfuscate My Email

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One of the longstanding ‘tricks’ that I see around the web is people obfuscating their email addresses. A quick search reveals that A List Apart talked about it in 2002 and again in 2007, so it’s been around for a hell of a long time in internet terms. We still do it on the Shopify App Store when displaying developer emails. I’m not usually one to question security decisions but seriously, why the hell are we still doing this?

Spam is a solved problem

I can’t remember the last time I got a piece of spam in my inbox. There’s a pile of spam in my spam folder, but who cares? Since 2004 when I got Gmail spam has been a non-issue for me. Even if every spammer on the globe got my email I think that my filter could probably handle it.

It’s fucking annoying

Every time I see davefp (at) gmail (dot) com, I cringe. Who wants to go around removing/replacing additional crap that has been added to an address to make it more ‘secure’? If anything, I’m less likely to want to email you if you write your email like that.

It doesn’t work

I hate email obfuscation for the same reason I dislike DRM: It only harms those without malicicious intent. The example above can be defeated with a single regular expression and about 30 seconds of editing my crawling script. Meanwhile, every single human beings that has legitimate reasons to be emailing me still has to decode my address.

So please, I beg of you: stop obfuscating your email address on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ , or wherever else you might be posting it. You’re not protecting yourself, you’re just pissing off the rest of the internet.

Apps That I’d Like to Write but Won’t

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Like many people in my field, I have the dream of one day starting my own company and making a fortune from it. That’s not happening just yet, but I have no shortage of ideas for when I do!

Citizen-Powered Real-Time Transit Schedules

Basically foursquare for buses, you’d ‘check in’ when you got on a bus and that data would be used to adjust the timetable for anyone further down the route. This is mainly useful where real-time transit data is not available through official channels (e.g. Ottawa).

Seating Advice for Long Trips

You enter the trip you’re taking (train, plane, coach etc.) and the app figures out which side of the vehicle you should sit to get shade and/or see points of interest. Traveling from Ottawa to Toronto on the train? Sit on the left side so that you’ll get a view of Lake Ontario on the way by. Things like that.

D&D Counter Generator

Around the time I wrote this post I was seriously considering creating a Dungeons and Dragons token generator that would allow you to make your own monster counters based on the designs I did and then download them as a pdf. The money-making part of this idea is that you’d be able to order nicely printed versions on pre-perforated card that would last longer and be generally higher quality.

Productive or Responsive: Pick One

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When people ask me what I do at my job, I often have a hard time explaining. ‘Developer Advocate’ isn’t exactly specific in the same way that ‘Software Engineer’, ‘Visual Designer’ or ‘Phone Support’ is. Truth be told, I’m not 100% sure what the true scope of my job is: It changes daily. I do app reviews, tech support, community management, and write blog posts. Sometimes I even write code.

Responsive

A lot of my time is spent reading, researching, and responding to emails that I get from merchants and developers. People tend to get annoyed when you don’t respond to them, so I feel a certain responsibility to reply as soon as I can. Unfortunately this is often a black hole and if I’m not careful I can spend whole days doing it which would be great, except that support is only one of my many responsibilities.

Productive

Another thing I sink time into is development. Right now I’m working on a tool for feeding merchant ideas to developers, and it’s a lot of fun. I really enjoy sitting down, getting stuck into the code and finishing the day with a new feature. Unfortunately when I do this my inbox inevitably fills up and I feel guilty about not tending to it.

Pick One

So that’s my dilemma: At any one time I can either be on top of my emails (responsive) or get ahead on my development (productive). Right now my strategy is to tackle my email in the morning, then switch to development after lunch regardless of whether I’m  ‘done’ or not (I’m beginning to suspect you can never be ‘done’ with email). This leaves me with a sense of accomplishment at the end of the day which I quite enjoy, but does result in a mountain of mail in the morning which is somewhat less fun.

 

The Flying Developer Gets Some Dodgy Solicitation

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The other day I got a letter from the ‘Domain Registry of Canada’, telling me that one of my domains was expiring soon, along with a handy renewal form for me to fill out.

There are several problems with this.

First and foremost, I’m not a customer of the ‘Domain Registry of Canada’. Despite appearances, they’re not an official body either. What they’ve done is scraped my info from the whois data and generated this solicitation letter. Once you take the time to actually read the thing this becomes apparent, but I have a huge problem with the fact that they’ve dressed it up as an official document. I’ve uploaded a copy below so you can see for yourself.

Oh, and their prices SUCK.

The Flying Developer is Going to Vancouver

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Are there any Vancouver hackers reading this? If so, you should come to HackVAN, the upcoming HackDays event in your city. I’ll be there representing Shopify and helping people build kick-ass things with our API. We’re also bringing prizes!

Having attended two of these events in the past as a participant, I’m super-excited to be on the other side of the fence and helping people out. If you’re planning on coming, you should read the article I wrote about How to Write an App in 8 Hours (or Die Trying).

The event is being held on August 20th, which is the Saturday after GROW. The location is TBD, but I still recommend you head over to the HackVAN registration page and sign up. I’ll see you there!