austinpreneur

Steal all my email secrets on Thursday at Innotech

On Thursday the 16th at 9am, Dennis Dayman and I will be giving a presentation on email deliverability at the Innotech conference in Austin. Come pick our brains about whitelisting, authentication, reputation and the infamous spam folder! We're also a great resource to ask about the various third party email providers and services.

• How can I get in touch with someone who can really help me at Hotmail or Yahoo?
  
• What can I do to reduce the number of people who click "this is spam" or unsubscribe from my emails?
  
• I've been told that I'm hitting a "spamtrap". Now what?
  
• How do I get off a blacklist?
  
• Do I need a dedicated IP address?
  
• Can I buy email addresses to add to my list? What about list rental?
  
• Any other questions that you want to ask!

We'll be giving a 20 minute overview of email deliverability and then we'll open it up to the audience to talk about real problems you are facing and suggestions for tackling them. We need your help! Please come prepared with questions about your email marketing programs.

Here are the slides:

Deliverability Innotech 2008

Email Secrets from Deliverability.com Joshua Baer & Dennis Dayman The Basics Sender ID Authentication Domain Keys Authentication Delivery Seeding Feedback Loops Whitelists secret #1 relevancy is most important secret #2 reputation is more important than content secret #3 From and Subject are most important secret #4 it is hard to send email by yourself secret #5 there is no secret to deliverability tell us your secrets tell us your problems Resources http://www.deliverability.com/ http://www.returnpath.net/ http://www.pivotalveracity.com/ http://www.lashback.com/ http://postmaster.aol.com/ http://postmaster.yahoo.com/ http://postmaster.hotmail.com/

Come learn Ruby on Rails on August 2nd

If you've been hearing about Ruby on Rails and wondering what all the fuss is about, come spend a Saturday learning Ruby on Rails with a group of experienced Rails developers as your guide. The program will outline the major pieces of Rails and dellve into the practial aspects of building web applications with the framework. Hands-on work on your own laptop will be encouraged during the work session.

Major topics will include:

• Some Ruby Basics
  
• Broad Rails Overview
  
• Building a Rails Application From the Ground Up
  
• Active Record Models and Database Migrations
  
• Views, Controllers, and Helpers: A Guided Tour
  
• Application Deployment with Capistrano 2
  
• App Lab

We'll be hosting the event on August 2nd from 10am to 5pm at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices. Space is limited so reserve your spot today!

Austin on Rails meeting Tuesday July 22nd

On Tuesday, July 22nd we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

Lightning Talks!
For our first segment this month, we are going to open up the floor for lightning talks, so please start thinking about what you would like to share now. We'll allow for 5 minutes or so per speaker, but no more than 10, and we'll fit in as many as we can. Good ideas for a talk might be a tool or technique you've learned recently, a new Rails project you've developed, a brief tutorial on a process or library you've found helpful. Etc! Should be fun.

Merb: The "Came for Rails, Stayed for Ruby" Framework
Merb is the pocket rocket framework that's creating buzz in the Rails community. Merb is fast. Merb is modular. Merb is efficient. And Merb might be the best choice for your next project. And it might not.

This presentation will provide an overview of the philosophy behind Merb, the 0.9 rewrite, where Merb is headed, and how it can compliment Rails. We will quickly dive into checking out Merb's internals, a few Merb plugins, and how you can get involved in the Merb project. Merb is a great example of a ruby project done right, and we'll highlight a few features that Merb knocks out of the park while helping your determine if merb is right for you.

Brian & Ben are partners in software consultancy specializing in Django, Rails, and Merb development. The team has closely followed the progress of both Merb and DataMapper since their respective 0.9 rewrites, contributing to the projects whenever possible. Since April 2008, they have been using Merb + DataMapper on new client applications.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

Austin On Rails meeting Tuesday June 24th

On Tuesday, June 24th we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

Client-Side Performance Measurement & Optimization
by Eric Falcao
Performance optimization tends to focus on topics like database tuning or server-side caching with the goal of getting response times as low as possible. A recent trend in client side optimization has been found to provide huge performance improvements to the user's experience.

In this talk, we will explore how to best measure the client-side download time and look at how to implement best practices (from O'Reilly's High Performance Web Sites) using a mongrel/rails/nginx stack.

Eric Falcao is a software developer at FiveRuns who has a passion for Internet startups and the business of software. Formerly of the .NET world, Eric is glad to be a part of the Ruby and Rails community and an advocate for the great startup climate in Austin. He blogs at http://austinentrepreneur.wordpress.com.

What's Coming in Rails 2.1?
by Steven Smith
Rails 2.1 was announced at this year's Rails Conference and had 1,400 contributors which resulted in 1,600+ patches. A lot has been done since the release of 2.0, which occurred approximately six months ago. This session will cover the major new features of Rails 2.1 including UTC-based migrations, better timezone support, and better caching.

Steven Smith is the Vice President of Engineering and co-founder at OtherInbox. He also founded FiveRuns, a venture-backed start up with the goal of bringing a simpler, smarter solution to the Ruby on Rails monitoring and management marketplace. Prior to FiveRuns, Steven was the CTO of Tonic Software and SVP of R&D at Neon Systems. He was also Founder and CEO of Relational Development, Inc., a software company specializing in System Management solutions from 1991 to 1998.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

Same Script, Different Cast -- How Social Networking Can Learn From E-mail

eMarketingandCommerce.com just published my article about How Social Networking Can Learn From E-mail. This was based on my earlier blog posting to Deliverability.com and edited by Carla Vicens.

Join me at Interactive Austin on June 19

I'll be speaking on a panel at 11:00am called "Managing Your Digital Landscape: Success Stories" along with
Andy Meadows, CEO, Live Oak 360; Tony Schum, Director of Economic Development, Greater Austin Chamber of Commerce; and Sam Decker, CMO, BazaarVoice.

Looks like a great lineup with lots of good friends participating including Dave Evans, Bill Leake, Jon Lebkowsky, Lorin Rivers and Michael Wilson.

My personal portfolio of companies is well represented! BazaarVoice, Datran Media, OneSpot and Small World Labs.

Austin on Rails meeting Tuesday May 27th

On Tuesday, May 27th we'll be hosting the Austin On Rails monthly meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices (fourth Tuesday of every month, 8th floor of the Omni Hotel at 7th and Brazos downtown). The meeting runs from 7pm - 9pm and then everyone heads to a bar for drinks after. Datran Media provides free drinks and pizza!

Topics for this month include...

ORM Deathmatch!
by Mike Perham
ActiveRecord isn't the only game in town when it comes time to access your database with Ruby. We'll take ActiveRecord, DataMapper and Sequel, put them in a steel cage match to the death and see who emerges victorious. Attendees in the first three rows might get bloody so bring a poncho.

Sinatra - a Tiny Ruby Web Framework
by Damon Clinkscales
There are times when Rails seems like massive overkill, but you would still like to use Ruby goodness. This is especially true when your entire web site idea can be contained inside one file. We'll take a look at the features of Sinatra and play around with a sample application based upon it.

Also, OtherInbox is hiring Ruby on Rails developers, so if you're interested in learning more please come to the meeting and find me!

Austin Social Media Club meeting - 60+ attendees!

Tonight we hosted the Austin Social Media Club meeting at the Datran Media and OtherInbox offices. More than 60 people showed up to hear Jon Lebkowsky and David Armistad discuss "The Headless Organization". It was an engaging discussion and I found it particularly relevant to the MailThink conference I'm organizing in September.